Author: Stieg Hedlund

New evidence for a Dutch sword in an English river (Solving the Sword, Part 6)

In Parts 1–5 of this series, I told a detective story: I deciphered the Witham Sword’s inscription, identified its owner, and followed it from Holland to England. In Part 5, I proposed a timing and motive for its ending up in the river—anti-Dutch spite during the Anglo-Dutch Wars. The pejoratives are real. The timeline aligns. The theory is plausible.

But a reader’s recent comment made me look into the case again, and it turns out the Witham Sword has a lot more to say.

For starters, the Witham has been receiving weapons for more than 2400 years.

David Stocker and Paul Everson surveyed the central Witham Valley—the stretch of river where the sword was found—mapping out:¹

• 10 causeways—ancient paths across the fenlands
• 6 barrow fields
• 10 churches, including Lincoln Cathedral
• 10 monasteries
• 20 metal finds

This paints a picture of the importance of the archaeological landscape. The metal finds include weapons: from the Late Bronze Age (1000–700 BCE) there are 17 swords and 14 axes, as well as spearheads and daggers. The two richest sites—Washingborough-Fiskerton and Stamp End—each produced dozens of deposits, and at both, the practice continued into the Iron Age (ca. 800 BCE–43 CE) and Romano-British period (43–410 CE), adding armor, helmets, shields, and decorated scabbards to the count. Across all periods, there are at least 90 weapon deposits from seven causeway sites in a single river valley.

These all belong to the same pattern:²

[T]he sacred significance of these locations started to be marked by a series of votive depositions, primarily of weapons and other military objects. At most of the sites, this sequence of votive depositions seems to have continued through the Iron Age and Romano-British periods, and in 70% of cases, deposition continued into the medieval period. The latest securely dated depositions in these sequences were made in the fourteenth century or later.

Millennia of practice, sustained across eras and cultures, deposits clustering near causeways across the fenlands and minster sites—the infrastructure points where the sacred geography of the river intersects with the built environment of the Church.

The Witham itself is the reason. It is liminal in every sense available—physical, political, cultural, sacred:³

The river formed not just the boundary for estates, parishes and manors, but in earlier times it was the boundary of the independent political state of Lindsey. It was, and still is, a boundary marked by important deep-rooted cultural differences, such as dialect. Nor was it merely a boundary of water; even today the Lindsey bank of the river on which the monasteries are set is relatively densely wooded, and it was even more so at Domesday. The remarkable line of Witham monasteries along this boundary, therefore, are visible entries and exits into a different place; secular as well as spiritual. They were all founded by Lindsey lords, and one could see them as symbolic guardians of the entry into the territory. In such circumstances, the causeways leading to these symbolic entries would necessarily become the foci of ritualised processions.

The Witham is a ritual corridor—a waterway that accumulated meaning over generations, each deposit reinforcing the sacredness of the act for the next. The causeways are thresholds; the monasteries are gatekeepers. A weapon placed into this water is not discarded. It is placed into a border between worlds—the same one prehistoric deposits recognized, the same that each successive culture inherited rather than invented.

Ben Raffield linked the Witham deposits to Sliðr, the river of swords that forms the border between Miðgarðr and Hel in Norse myth—a boundary river receiving weapons as a matter of cosmology.⁴ Nordic settlers in the Witham Valley during the Anglo-Saxon period (410–1066) easily recognized and continued the practice.

The Church did the same—the river’s ancient power was not denied—it was simply reassigned:⁵

By the action of washing St Oswald’s bones in the Witham waters, the traditional power of those waters was henceforward attributed to the saint, rather than to whatever water-spirits might have been resident previously.

Stocker and Everson’s phrase is “Church-supervised deposition”. The Church didn’t suppress the practice, it administered it. Similarly, the churches and monasteries that cluster near the deposition sites aren’t obstacles to the ritual—they’re its infrastructure.

They posit a theory on the ritual’s meaning:⁶

It may be […] that casting the lord’s sword, his symbol of lordship, into the river represented a symbolic termination of that lordship, in the same way that the staffs of officers of the royal household were traditionally broken at their funerals. […] [T]he deposition of swords—the symbols perhaps of those Lindsey lordships—in the boundary river might be seen as a symbolic “defence” of the approaches to Lindsey, much as Excalibur was the symbol of Arthur’s defence of his kingdom and had to be returned to the spiritual guardian of the state, the Lady of the Lake, once it had served its purpose in this world. Were the Witham swords similarly seen as the obligatory military offering by the community’s nominal war-leaders to mark their frontier?

A 10th-century Viking sword was found in the Witham, close to Lincoln. Two high-status blades, separated by three centuries, deposited in the same corridor. Part 5 asked how a Dutch sword ended up in an English river. The ritual corridor doesn’t answer that question. It replaces it with a better one: why has this particular river been receiving swords for as long as anyone has been making them?

Stocker and Everson describe the central Witham valley as sacred from the Bronze Age onward:⁷

[A] more-or-less continuous ritual tradition, focused at regularly spaced locations, where community rituals had occurred from the Bronze Age onwards. At each, the initial focus was a conventional barrow cemetery, but when these were flooded […] the rituals became transferred to watery features in the new landscape.

These included the river itself, as well as pools and meres along its course. As to the depositions therein:⁸

Although we know nothing about the specific rituals undertaken on these occasions, we may guess that they included casting nets into the river and may wonder whether such ceremonies belong to that large group of pagan festivals that were christianised in the conversion period. In this case at least, it seems, the connection with the river is explicit.

The Christian buildings did not displace the sacred geography—they indexed it. What had been marked by water and open ground was now marked by consecrated stone. 

This pattern—pagan practice absorbed into Christian infrastructure rather than eliminated by it—is not unique to the Witham. The sacred springs at Bath, the subject of several articles in the Defixiones series on this blog, follow the same logic. As does the Thames, another English river whose weapon deposits span centuries of changing justification.

This is the reframe my Anglo-Dutch spite theory misses. The hostility was real, and a Dutch sword may have attracted special contempt during the wars. But spite alone doesn’t explain why this river. It doesn’t explain the Viking sword. It doesn’t explain over two thousand years of precedent. The act Part 5 attributed to politics belongs to the landscape itself.

That accounts for why the sword was deposited into the Withham. But the inscription—the Christus vincit formula that identifies the sword—needs its own proof. In my original series, it had a problem. The only parallels I could find were on coins—specifically the écu d’or, first struck under Louis IX in 1266, bearing on its reverse:

XP[iσto]C V[in]CIT X[Piσto]C R[egn]AT XP[iσto]C I[n]PERAT
Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands.

The coins proved the laudes regiæ circulated on metal. But they proved it too late. The first écu was minted a decade after Willem II’s death. The Witham Sword’s inscription—compressed almost past recognition into a cryptic sequence of letters—presupposes an audience that knows what is being abbreviated. A formula so severely contracted can only function if the full version is already in the room. The écu, arriving afterward, can’t do that work.

Nor could I find it inscribed on weapons—another important part of what needed to be established as a tradition a coin, of whatever date, could not perform. But it turns out it was inscribed on at least one weapon—and not just any weapon either.

The formula appears on a sword displayed in Vienna’s Kaiserlichen Schatzkammer right beside the Zeremonienschwert I discussed in Part 2.⁹

On one face of its crossguard, the sword spells out the formula nearly in full:

+C[H]RISTVS•VINCIT•C[H]RISTVS•REIGNAT•CHRIST[VS]•INPERAT

And on the reverse, an abbreviated version:

+C[H]RISTVS:VINCIT:C[H]RISTVS REINAT

The longer version is easily understood, using only the most conventional contractions. The sword dates to the end of the 12th century—likely Otto IV’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor (HRE) in 1198, roughly half a century before Willem II gained the same title. The same formula, on the same same kind of weapon, in the same imperial tradition a full generation before the Witham sword.

The Reichsschwert doesn’t just prove the laudes regiæ appeared on swords. It proves the convention was already legible—already a recognized practice in the imperial coronation tradition—by the time someone compressed it onto the Witham blade. The severe abbreviation is shorthand and the Reichsschwert is the longhand it abbreviates.¹⁰

An inventory of Trifels Castle—a Reichsburg since 1113 under HRE Henry V—from 1246 records:¹¹

zwey swert mit zweyn scheiden, gezieret mit edelem gesteyne
Two swords with two scabbards, adorned with precious stones

These are commonly interpreted to be the Reichsschwert and the Zeremonienschwert. Both would have been brought to Aachen for Willem’s coronation, the same occasion on which he added the eagles to the scabbard of the latter. He didn’t need to go looking for the Christus vincit formula—he held it in his hands. He put his mark on the Zeremonienschwert and he claimed the laudes regiae from the Reichsschwert for his own blade.

Still, while the inscription identifies a tradition, the blade identifies a sword.

The equestrian seal is the most standardized image in medieval sigillography—a fixed compositional formula of mounted warrior, armed and armored, repeated across every barony and county in western Europe. But the formula is a container, not a portrait. What fills it is individual. As John Cherry notes:¹²

[Seals] provide evidence for changes in fashion in both secular and ecclesiastical costume and for the development of armour.

They are not symbols of knighthood. They are records of a specific knight’s equipment. They provide enough specific detail historians have used them as evidence for changes in helm and shield design.

Adrian Ailes traces the relationship to its origin:¹³

Armorial bearings […] first appeared on “equestrian” seals in the 1130s. Here the seal owner was typically dressed as a mounted knight in full armour, his shield (and occasionally banner and horse caparison) displaying his personal device.

The heraldic shield—the device most associated with medieval identity—began as one detail inside the equestrian seal before migrating, by the end of the twelfth century, onto its own separate seal. The equestrian image was the original identity document; heraldry evolved out of it rather than being added to it.

And the investment was not limited to great lords. A seal matrix recovered in Berkshire—belonging to Fulk III FitzWarin, Lord of Whitington, Shropshire—is described thus:¹⁴

The image is so well detailed that mail, folds in the surcoat, shield and swordbelt strap and the slit and grill in the helmet are all clearly visible.

If even an obscure knight’s seal engraver rendered individual equipment at that resolution, a Count of Holland’s seal is not showing a generic sword. When Floris V’s blade carries double fullers in wax, the engraver is recording what he saw.

Double-fullered swords—blades with two parallel grooves rather than the standard single channel—are vanishingly rare in the medieval record. A recent catalogue of early medieval European swords found just 11 confirmed examples in a corpus of roughly 5,500—0.2%.¹⁵ Alfred Geibig’s typology of sword blades excludes double fullers entirely; there are too few to constitute a type.¹⁶ By the 13th century, the feature is rarer still, as blade geometry shifts toward the broad single fuller characteristic of Oakeshott’s Types XII and XIII.¹⁷

All this should make it clear the Witham Sword’s double fullers don’t represent a type, but a unique blade. And the sword on the seal of Willem’s son, Floris V, bears this same feature.¹⁸

Overlay Floris V’s seal on a photograph of the Witham sword, and they match. Not approximately—almost exactly. The double fullering, the length and breadth of the blade, the shape of the weapon: the contours of a wax impression struck in 1288 align with a steel blade pulled from a Lincolnshire river in the 19th century. The seal doesn’t depict a sword. It depicts this sword—an image that could only have been created with the weapon as its model.

The inscription names the owner. The seal places the sword in his son’s hand. What remains is the route—how a Dutch sword reached a Lincolnshire river, and when. Before tracing it, one of my previous objections needs dissolving.

The sheer volume of finds in the ritual landscape of Lincoln means there is actually another inscribed Witham Sword in the British Museum’s collection—the 10th-century one I’ve mentioned already. Properly, the Witham Sword I’ve been discussing is called the Witham knightly Sword to distinguish it from this Viking one.¹⁹

Clearly, it’s also the sword of an elite. Specialist in early swords, Ian G. Peirce describes it as:²⁰

[O]ne of the most splendid Viking swords extant […]. [B]lade, guard and pommel […] form an harmonious [sic] whole.

Its inscription, which appears on one other sword in Tatarstan, reads:

+ LEUTLRIT

This is generally interpreted as Lutfrit—the name of the sword’s smith—a typical blade inscription of that age.

Peirce also notes:²¹

Its excellent condition may be attributed to the splendid preservation qualities of the river mud which, as one would expect, dissolved the grip but most effectively nurtured the metallic elements of the weapon.

This observation removes my earlier concerns about the knightly sword’s condition. I felt its excellent state implied a later deposition—that it could not have spent centuries submerged—the Witham Viking sword answers that. It is 200 years older. It survived just as well.

Based on this, I’ll tighten my timeline. In 1285, Floris V betrothed his infant son Jan I to Elizabeth, daughter of Edward I of England. The child was sent across the North Sea to be raised at the English court. He was six years old. He was also the last male heir of the House of Holland.

What travels with a six-year-old prince to a foreign court? Attendants. Letters of credential. And the objects that prove his claims—the dynasty’s regalia, its sword. Of course, I’m still guessing here. But the inference has weight. The weapon the seal of Floris proves he carried, that Willem II inscribed—this is exactly the kind of object that accompanies a dynastic betrothal. It does not represent the lineage. It is that lineage made steel.

Jan died in 1299, at 15. Holland passed to the House of Avesnes through the Hainaut line. There was no one to return the sword to. Edward became its owner by default—not by conquest, not by right, but by the quiet accident of a boy dying young.

Edward died in 1307 at Burgh by Sands, within sight of the Scottish border he had spent his reign trying to erase. Among his closest confidants was Henry de Lacy, the third Earl of Lincoln. The king’s body was sent south—first to lie in state at Waltham Abbey, then to burial at Westminster. This route passes through Lincolnshire. Through Lincoln.

Why would the king’s close companion not stop at his own castle on the way? And why would he not honor his friend with the rituals of the landscape of his home?

We do not know what happened to Edward’s arms. When Edward I’s tomb was opened at Westminster in 1774, the king lay with crown, staff, and scepter—no sword. But we know what happened to weapons in the Witham Valley when a lord died and his body passed through the ritual corridor. The tradition Stocker and Everson documented wasn’t ancient history in 1307. It was still operating.

This investigation is not closed. Floris’ seal arrived years after my case files were published, proving it was modeled on a surviving blade. The laudes regiæ inscription on a different HRE sword evaded me previously. Evidence does not arrive on a schedule. The next piece may already be in a collection catalog, a museum drawer, a comment thread—wherever the thing you weren’t looking for lurks.

I’d like to thank Aaron Stone, who brought Floris’ seal to my attention.

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This article is part of the Solving the Sword series

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Notes

1. David Stocker and Paul Everson, “The Straight and Narrow Way: Fenland Causeways and the Conversion of the Landscape in the Witham Valley, Lincolnshire”, The Cross Goes North, 2003.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ben Raffield, “A River of Knives and Swords: Patterns of Deposition Along a Fenland Waterway”, European Journal of Archaeology, 2014.
5. Stocker and Everson, 2003.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Das Reichsschwert (Mauritiusschwert), WS XIII 17, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Weltliche Schatzkammer, end of the 12th century. Note two different renderings of Christ even in this brief inscription—just the type of thing that confounds interpreters.
10. Workshop of Johann Baptist Homann (?), “Authentica repraesentatio duorum Insignivm Imperii Romano-Germanici”, 1755.
11. Mittelalterliche Schatzverzeichnisse 1: Von der Zeit Karls des Großen bis zur Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts, Central Institute for Art History and Bernhard Bischoff, eds., 1967.
12. John Cherry, “Sigillography”, Britannica (website), retrieved July 2026.
13. Adrian Ailes, “Medieval Armorial Seals in The National Archives (UK)”, A Companion to Seals in the Middle Ages, Laura J. Whatley, ed., 2019.
14. A. Byard, “BERK-FDCFD2: A Medieval Seal Matrix”, finds.org.uk,  2014.
15. Tomáš Vlasatý, “Swords with Double Fullers: 8th–12th Centuries”, Project Forlǫg (website), February 2026.
16. Alfred Geibig, Entwicklung des Schwertes im Mittelalter, 1991.
17. Ewart Oakeshott, The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry, 1960.
18. Seal of Floris V of Holland, NG-KOG-1901-52, Rijksmuseum, 1288.
19. River Witham Sword, 1848,1021.1, British Museum, 10th century.
20. Ian Peirce, “The Development of the Medieval Sword c.850–1300”, The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood III: Papers from the Fourth Strawberry Hill Conference, Christopher Harper and Bill, Ruth Harvey, eds., 1990.
21. Ibid.
22. Illustration from the 1774 exploration of Edward I of England’s tomb in Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, 2008.

Luhrmann namechecks but doesn’t come correct (“Roll Over McFly” Addendum C, Gladwellocalypse, Part 4 Addendum)

I like Baz Luhrmann. Moulin Rouge! (2001) is a film that works on a level most spectacles don’t even attempt. I’ll quote myself from an interview a while back:¹

Christian [Ewan McGregor] is drawn into the Bohemian world by Toulouse-Lautrec [John Leguizamo] and a narcoleptic Argentinean [Jacek Koman]. Now, this is very entertaining and engaging on the surface level, but it also really works well on the symbolic, mythical level: The dwarf is small physically because his power is not of the physical world, and the narcoleptic spends more time in the subconscious world of dreams than he does in this one.

Luhrmann’s movies have always been fascinated with surfaces and rarely been particularly interested in multi-dimensional people. His attempt to recontextualize Romeo and Juliet had its hits and misses, but was entertaining. The Campbellian monomyth I spotted in Moulin Rouge! implies the use of archetypes, which is definitely the case in that film.

This is what Luhrmann is good at. Surfaces that shimmer. Archetypes that resonate. Myth deployed as structure.

The problem with Elvis (2022) is that Elvis Presley’s story is not an archetype. It’s a specific history with specific receipts. And Luhrmann made an archetype movie about it anyway.

Luhrmann’s Elvis has been thoroughly fact-checked. The Smithsonian documented what it compresses.² Others have noted what it rearranges, what it gets roughly right. Music journalist Alanna Nash put a fine point on its fabrications:³

It’s all a Baz Luhrmann fever dream.

This article is not concerned with adding to that inventory. What interests me is the direction of the errors—because they all point the same way, and this pattern tells you more about the film’s failure than any individual inaccuracy does.

Certainly, as Alfred Matthew “Wierd Al” Yankovic notes, music biopics, “play around with the facts for dramatic purpose”.⁴ In particular, he was “inspired” by Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), which he called, “famously not accurate in a lot of ways”,⁵ to turn his own into a sendup:⁶

Maybe I should do a biopic but just have it go completely off the rails.

Elvis’s most revealing fabrication is not a detail it gets wrong but the genre it invents. Luhrmann depicts Presley fusing blues and gospel into something new—a creation myth, complete with the threshold-crossing required by the monomyth. The young man hears two traditions, synthesizes them in a moment of divine inspiration, and rock and roll is born.

But rock and roll already existed. Black musicians had already made it. Presley didn’t fuse two traditions into a new genre—he heard a genre that was already there and performed it. This is an important distinction: a creation myth requires a creator, while a performer entering an existing genre is just a performer. There is no threshold to cross. There is no alchemical moment. There is a kid from Tupelo who heard something and was a good mimic.

Luhrmann needs the creation myth because without it there is no monomyth. The hero’s journey requires a transformation—the ordinary world yielding to the extraordinary one.

If Presley simply heard rock and roll and started singing it, there is no journey. There is just a career. And careers are not what Luhrmann makes movies about.

This is not a fact-checking failure. No amount of sloppy research makes you depict someone inventing a genre that predates him. This is the archetype demanding an origin story and the filmmaker supplying one.

This is the same mechanism I examined in “Roll Over McFly”. Back to the Future plays the false origin myth as comedy—Marty literally invents rock and roll on stage while Chuck Berry listens on a telephone—but the underlying operation is identical. A white performer is given a creation moment that erases the prior existence of a Black musical tradition.

Robert Zemeckis does it as a sight gag. Luhrmann does it as monomyth. The tone is different but the erasure is the same. In both cases, rock and roll is presented as something that begins rather than something that was already there—and in both cases, the false origin places a white body at the point of creation.

The film attempts a nod to Presley’s influences—one of the areas Nash calls out as:⁷

[T]he tremendous pains Baz has taken to make this story seem “woke” […].

Luhrmann shows him as inspired by black gospel music during his youth in Tupelo, then moving to Memphis where he hears singers like Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola). Of these, Nash notes:⁸

Elvis is famously quoted as saying, “Down in Tupelo, Miss., I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said, if I ever got to the place I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody saw.” But it’s unclear whether this was on the radio or in person.

Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) appears in the film. The exploitation is acknowledged. But acknowledgment and engagement are different operations, and Luhrmann has never been especially interested in the second.

Consider the key scene about Thornton’s “Hound Dog”. Prior to Presley’s (Austin Butler)  first TV appearance he is talking to B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.).⁹

King: So what’s it gonna be? How you gonna blow their wigs off?
Presley: Well, the network wants me to do a ballad. But I’m thinking about cutting it up with “Hound Dog”.
King: Woo! Elvis Presley, “Hound Dog”, and Uncle Miltie [Milton Berle]. Strange things are happening every day.

The scene implies a direct lineage—Elvis takes “Hound Dog” from the Black tradition, with King’s blessing, and carries it into the white mainstream. The transaction looks clean. A song crosses the color line in a moment of shared enthusiasm.

But Elvis didn’t learn “Hound Dog” from Thornton’s record. He saw Freddie Bell and the Bellboys perform it in Las Vegas—white performers who had already reworked it into a novelty number. The chain from Thornton to Presley was not Black woman to white man. It was Black woman to white men to white man—a song already laundered through white performance before Elvis ever touched it. The film erases the intermediary because the intermediary complicates the archetype: a system already in operation is not a mythic crossing. It is a mechanism. And mechanisms are not what Luhrmann shoots.

Then there’s the montage. Luhrmann scores Tharpe’s “Strange Things Are Happening Every Day” over the aftermath of Elvis’s TV appearance—a Black gospel record from 1944. The song intends these strange things as divine mystery, the inexplicable operations of grace. In Luhrmann’s edit suite, the strange thing happening is Elvis. A Black woman’s recording of a song about God becomes the soundtrack to a white man’s ascension. This is the McFly maneuver—the Black artist’s work conscripted retroactively into the white performer’s origin story. Tharpe is not a person in this montage. She is a needle drop.

The Elvis discourse has always been polarized in a way that makes it easy to process as myth. On one side: the rock and roll messiah, the white kid who loved Black music and brought it to the world. On the other: Chuck D’s:¹⁰

Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me
[S]traight-out racist, that sucker was simple and plain

These are archetypes—the savior and the fraud—and Luhrmann’s lens is naturally drawn to that binary because binaries are what spectacle runs on.

The film doesn’t just frame Presley on the messiah side of this binary—it performs it. When he is bewildered by his sudden fame, he goes to Club Handy in Memphis, where Black crowds greet him with adulation and he seeks the counsel of B.B. King. When he’s lost in the machinery of his movie career, a Black gospel performer on television calls him back to the music he loves. The pattern is consistent: whenever Elvis needs authenticating, Black communities provide it. Whenever he needs rescuing from the white industry around him, Black music is the rescue.

Photographic archivist Michael Ochs crystallizes the underlying logic:¹¹

[A] lot of people in retrospect attack Elvis for stealin’ the black music and making it white. I say Elvis Presley had a black soul with a white face […].

This is the immaculate miscegenation as ontology—the crossing presented not as something that happened through contracts and exploitation, but as something Elvis simply was. The mechanism disappears because there is no mechanism. Just a miraculous condition.

When Luhrmann tells Presley’s story as a mythic rise and fall, he is doing the same thing the music industry did in the 1950s—taking something specific and converting it into something universal. Something that feels like it means something without requiring you to follow the money. The shimmer replaces the receipt. This is precisely what Margo Jefferson describes as immaculate miscegenation:¹² cultural mixing presented as a kind of virgin birth, with no visible mechanism, no paper trail. Luhrmann’s Elvis is that process performed in real time.

And it mythologizes in both directions simultaneously—flattening Elvis into the appropriation archetype while flattening the appropriation itself into spectacle. Reductive about the man and reductive about the system at the same time. Not because Luhrmann is dishonest. Because his toolkit—monomyth, archetype, spectacle—is structurally incapable of rendering the thing that actually happened. The system is not an archetype. It is a set of contracts. And contracts are not cinematic.

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This article is part of the Gladwellocalypse series and an addendum to “Roll Over McFly”

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Notes

1. Shannon Drake “The Lexicon of Latin”, The Escapist, October 2006.
2. Grant Wong, “The True History Behind Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Elvis’”, Smithsonian Magazine, June 2022.
3. Chris Willman, “‘Elvis’ Fact or Fiction: Colonel Tom Parker Biographer on What’s Real and What’s Not in Baz Luhrmann Biopic”, Variety, June 2022.
4. Emily Aslanian, Weird Al on How His ‘Completely Off the Rails’ Biopic Came About, TV Insider, December 2022.
5. Russ Burlingame, “Weird Al Yankovic Reveals Bohemian Rhapsody Inspired Him to Make His Own Biopic”, Comicbook.com, June 2023
6. Aslanian, 2022.
7. Willman, 2022.
8. Ibid.
9. Elvis (film), 2022.
10. Carlton Ridenhour, Eric Sadler, Hank Boxley, and Keith Boxley, “Fight the Power”, 1989.
11.  Quoted (but not cited) in “Elvis Presley and the Black Community: Dispelling the Myths”, Elvis Presley biography (website), February 2020.
12. Margo Jefferson, “Ripping Off Black Music”, Harper’s Magazine, 1973.

Why your “Viking tattoo” is Greek water divination (Viking Esoterica, Part 3 Addendum)

In my article on Icelandic magical staves, I argued such symbols—focusing particularly on Ægishjálmur, the best-known exemplar—belong not to the Viking Age, but to early modern tradition. They are not survivals of pagan practice so much as products of a later, manuscript-based magical culture.

The argument advanced here runs against a popular counter-position worth naming at the outset. In contemporary Heathen and Ásatrú literature, in Icelandic-tourism merchandising, and occasionally in the pop-occult writings of Stephen Flowers — particularly The Galdrabók and Icelandic Magic¹—the Ægishjálmur is presented as a Viking-Age survival, an unbroken Norse tradition preserved through the Christian centuries in scribal margins and folk memory.

The position carries cultural weight but rests on a thin evidentiary base, as I will show. The medieval ǿgishjalmr is a kenning for an aura of fearsome dominance, not a drawn artifact; the earliest visual attestations of a sigil bearing the name appear only ca. 1500, with no continuous transmission across the intervening centuries; and the form itself, when finally drawn, carries the geometric vocabulary of the European grimoire tradition rather than any precedent in Norse decorative art. The survivalist reading takes the early-modern moment as preservation; the case made here takes it as generation.

But this raises a more interesting question. If the symbol itself comes late, why that name? Why does a word attested in medieval literature—ǿgishjalmr—become attached, centuries later, to a graphic sigil used for protection and domination?

As with the Sator Square, the journey from the original use to the latter one is worth examining.

The starting point is deceptively simple: what is ǿgishjalmr? I should note that though I interpreted ǿgishjalmr as a kenning describing a terror-striking glance, there remains some debate as to whether it should instead be seen as a physical item.

To revisit Fáfnismál, Fáfnir relates his wearing of ǿgishjalmr and Sigurðr responds:²

Ægis hjálmr
bergr einugi
hvar [s] skulu reiðir vega;
þá það finnr
er með fleirum kjömr
að engi er einna hvatastr.

The ǿgishjalmr protects no one,
Where furious men have to fight;
A man finds out when he comes among a multitude;
That no one is bravest of all.

Taken literally, this is a strange thing to say about an object. Sigurðr’s point is not that the object fails materially, but that fear ceases to function when it is no longer asymmetrical. The “helm” offers no protection once others cease to be afraid.

This strongly suggests ǿgishjalmr is not a physical object, but a condition: an aura of terror, a capacity to overawe.

Other contemporaneous attestations complicate the picture without resolving it. Reginsmál refers to ǿgishjalmr. Similarly, this account says it belongs to Fáfnir:³

Hann átti ægishjálm er öll kvikvendi hræddust við.

He had an ǿgishjalmr that all living creatures feared.

This is simply definitional rather than descriptive. It tells us what the helm does, not what it is. It does not disambiguate whether it is an item or a trait of the ormr (serpent).

Another retelling of the tale, Vǫlsunga saga, from the late 13th century, covers much of the same ground, but adds another layer. Fáfnir asks Sigurðr:⁴

Hafðir þú eigi frétt þatt, hversu allt fólk er hrætt við mik ok við minn ægishjálm? 

Notably, early translators William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson clearly take ǿgishjalmr as metaphorical, rendering the passage:⁵

Hadst thou never heard how that all folk were adrad of me, and of the awe of my countenance?

This collapses the helm into an effect of presence rather than an object worn.

Only in Skáldskaparmál do we get something that looks like a literal item. We learn how Fáfnir came to possess ǿgishjalmr, previously owned by Hreiðmarr:⁶

Fáfnir hafði þá tekit hjálm, er Hreiðmarr hafði átt, ok setti á hǫfuð sér, er kallaðr var ægishjalmr, er ǫll kvikendi hræðast

Fáfnir had taken the helmet which Hreidmarr had possessed, and set it upon his head (this helmet was called the ǿgishjalmr, of which all living creatures that see it are afraid) […] 

But even here, the emphasis is not on its materiality—how it is made, what it looks like—but on its effect: it produces fear.

The ambiguity of ǿgishjalmr becomes clearer when contrasted with something unambiguously material: Sigurðr’s sword, Gramr. It belongs to the same Vǫlsung cycle, yet is treated in a fundamentally different way by the sources:⁷

Varðveit ok vel sverðsbrotin. Þar af má gera gott sverð, er heita mun Gramr ok sonr okkarr mun bera ok þar mörg stórverk með vinna

[K]eep well withal the shards of the sword: thereof shall a goodly sword be made, and it shall be called Gram, and our son shall bear it, and shall work many a great work therewith […]

The details of the reforging are similarly unambiguous:⁸

Reginn gerir nú eitt sverð. Ok er hann bar ór aflinum, sýndist smiðjusveinum sem eldar brynni ór eggjunum; biðr nú Sigurð við taka sverðinu ok kveðst eigi kunna sverð at gera, ef þetta bilar. Sigurðr hjó í steðjann ok klauf niðr í fótinn, ok brast eigi né brotnaði. Hann lofaði sverðit mjök ok fór til árinnar með ullarlagð ok kastar í gegn straumi, ok tók í sundr, er hann brá við sverðinu.

So he made a sword, and as he bore it forth from the forge, it seemed to the smiths as though fire burned along the edges thereof. Now he bade Sigurd take the sword, and said he knew not how to make a sword if this one failed. Then Sigurd smote it into the anvil, and cleft it down to the stock thereof, and neither burst the sword nor brake it. Then he praised the sword much, and thereafter went to the river with a lock of wool, and threw it up against the stream, and it fell asunder when it met the sword.

Here we clearly have a physical item—one that went directly into J. R. R. Tolkien’s swipe file. The narrative dwells on its physical properties, its manufacture, its performance. It behaves like an object. It is:

• Broken into shards
• Reforged by Reginn
• Tested against an anvil
• Demonstrated by slicing wool in a river current

Again, the contrast between these descriptions and those of ǿgishjalmr is striking.

Instead, we get a repeated emphasis on fear—who feels it, when it works, when it fails. The contrast is telling. Where Gramr is a thing that does, ǿgishjalmr is something closer to a way of being perceived.

The 13th-century Laxdæla saga is another contemporaneous work in which ǿgishjalmr appears, but its use there is clear. The phrase bera ægishjalmr yfir (“to bear the helm of terror over [someone]”) appears idiomatically, meaning to cow, dominate, or overawe:⁹

Sá […] mun bera heldur ægishjálm yfir þér.

He […] will wear an ǿgishjalmr before you.

No reader is meant to imagine a literal helmet being worn. The phrase denotes dominance—psychological, social, interpersonal.

The linguistic shift here runs in the less expected direction. Ægishjálmr in the Eddic corpus names an effect, not an object—the aura of dominant terror Fáfnir bears, not a helmet he wears. The early-modern shift is not abstraction; it is concretion. A kenning for a felt power becomes a figure that can be drawn, copied, and pasted into a manuscript. The abstraction acquires a body, rather than the other way around.

The orthography of this article’s title rehearses its argument. ǿgishjalmr is the medieval form: Old Icelandic masculine, with ⟨ø⟩ for the long rounded vowel /ø:/, hard ⟨g⟩, the masculine nominative ⟨-r⟩ ending, and an unmarked stem vowel. Ægishjálmur is the modern form, after four independent shifts worked through the language between the late 14th and 17th centuries — the merger of long /ø:/ with /ai:/ (orthographically rationalized to ⟨æ⟩), ⟨g⟩ softened to /j/, u-epenthesis resolving the consonant-final ⟨-r⟩ to ⟨-ur⟩, and the codification of the historical long /a:/ with the acute accent.

Each change is small—you can see some intermediate forms in this article. But while every speaker throughout the period would have insisted they were saying the same thing, together they transform the word’s surface entirely. By the time early-modern scribes are drawing the figure they call Ægishjálmur in the galdrabækur, they are also speaking and writing a form of the noun that did not exist in the saga corpus from which they take their license. A name continuous in its self-understanding but not in its substance.

The medieval semantic field of ǿgishjalmr—fear projected from the gaze, dominance encoded in the face—is well-attested in the material surveyed above. But there is no medieval evidence for the word naming a visual sigil. That fusion is a product of the early modern period, and to understand it we must look first at the form, not the name.

The most striking recent contribution to this question is Roberto Luigi Pagani’s argument for the Mediterranean origin of the galdrastafir. First, he dismisses the survivor argument, thus:¹⁰

While it may be tempting to interpret this symbol as deriving from ancient Norse magical thought, perhaps as a collection of ᛘ-runes, it bears considerable resemblance to medieval and Renaissance defensive talismans, especially planetary pentacles found [in] the Key of Solomon, some of which are used to protect the wearer in combat and contain a circular structure with stylised points radiating outward. Both serve similar functions and share a similar visual language although the Ægishjálmur lacks the Latin inscriptions and divine names that characterise the Solomonic model. It is advisable to resist the temptation of seeing runes everywhere within any given galdrastafur: most runes are made by a couple of intersecting lines, while galdrastafir are formed from several intersecting lines, so it becomes inevitable that some of those should intersect in a manner reminiscent of runes.

He then traces the geometric vocabulary of the Icelandic staves—radial symmetry, intersecting lines terminating in tridents, spears, or forked appendages—to a much older Greek and southern Italian sigil tradition preserved most clearly in the Ὑγρομαντεία (Hygromanteia; “water divination”), a Byzantine grimoire circulating in manuscripts from the 14th and 15th centuries, likely originating in southern Italy.¹¹ ¹²

The single most consequential witness is Harley 5596,¹³ which preserves a series of circular sigils whose visual logic is essentially that of the earliest Icelandic galdrastafir: a center with radiating arms and round or square forked terminations.¹⁴

What Pagani’s argument does not address—and where this paper takes up the question—is the name. The earliest Icelandic textual context for drawn magical staves is the Lækningakver from ca. 1500.¹⁵ It belongs to the same family of vernacular medical-magical compendia I traced through the Trotula in Blessings Through Sator: continental Salernitan material received and reshaped at the northern margin, with rational remedies and charm-formulae sharing the page rather than competing for it.

The Lækningakver is decisive for the chronology: it predates the classic galdrabók tradition by about a century and shows a version of the drawn sigil was already domesticated in Iceland, as well as—separately—a washing prayer containing Ægishjálmur:¹⁶

Fjón þvæ ek af mér fjanda minna,
rán ok reiði ríkra manna,
svá at þeir glaðliga mér gangi á móti
ok hæjandi mik augum líti.
Ást drep ek hendi, lýk ek fésakir,
lýk ek fjǫrsakir, lýk ek enna mestu manna sakir.
Guð líti mik ok góðir menn,
sjái hverr á mik sælðaraugum
Ǿgishjálm er ek ber í millum brúna […].

I wash off of me the hatred of my enemies, the robbery and anger of powerful men, so that they meet me happily and look upon me laughing. I touch love with my hand, I close property disputes, I close killing disputes, I close the greatest disputes of men. May God and good men look upon me, may everyone look upon me with eyes of happiness, I bear the Ægishjálmur between my eyes […].

Ægishjálmur’s connection to the symbol known in modernity emerges in 1670 in Galdrakver:¹⁷

Ægiz hialmur h[an]n sk[al]
giorast a blij [og] þrickia
J en[n]i si[er] þa m[adur] a uön a
ouin sijnu[m] ad h[an]n mæti
h[onu]m [og] muntu han[n] Jf(er]uin[n]a
(h[an]n er so s[em] hi[er] ept[er] filger)

Aegishjálmur. It must be made in lead and printed on one’s forehead when a man has expectation that he will meet his enemy and you will overcome him.

If the Ægishjálmur were a continuous Viking-Age symbol, we would expect a single, fixed form. We find the opposite. Pagani’s comparison sets four examples side by side: a simple circle-terminated eight-armed figure from the Lækningakver, two intermediate variants from a Swedish Galdrabók of the 16th–17th century,¹⁸ and the elaborated eight-spoked canonical form from Galdrakver.¹⁹

The diachronic story the plate tells is itself diagnostic. The figure does not arrive whole and then degrade through copying—it begins simple and gains complexity over the century and a half between its earliest and most developed attestations. That trajectory is structurally incompatible with a received-artifact model. Received artifacts fossilize; they do not elaborate.

The figure varies in other ways across the primary corpus as well: sometimes four arms, sometimes eight radiating spokes, often bearing runic or pseudo-runic appendages. Many sigils in the Icelandic galdrabækur grant the same magical effects—protection, the induction of fear—yet go by different names; only some of these are explicitly labeled Ægishjálmur. This formal fluidity is itself an argument. The name and the image are loosely coupled, attaching and detaching across manuscripts in ways no genuinely received Viking-Age artifact would tolerate.

A particularly sharp witness to this looseness is the Huld manuscript of 1847, which contains a figure recognisable as the Ægishjálmur with only minor formal differences—but labels it thus:²⁰

No. XXI. Salomons Insigli. Berist á sér til varnar.

No. XXI. Solomon’s Seal. Carried on oneself for defence.

Here the fusion runs in the opposite direction from the one observed earlier: a figure structurally identical to Ægishjálmur is given a continental name.

This demonstrates not a tradition with stable names attached to stable forms, but one in which a small inventory of sigils is being labeled, relabeled, and recombined according to the immediate needs of the magical practitioner. The Huld image is the inverse of that in Galdrakver: the same form, the other naming convention.

The most direct evidence for this syncretic environment is empirical. A list of 80 spells contained in a grimoire confiscated at the episcopal school at Skálholt in 1664.²¹ It included Ægishjálmur, Solomon’s Seal, the Lord’s Seal, the SATOR square, and invocations of Þórr and Óðinn.

A single confiscated book holding all four traditions side by side—Norse pagan, Solomonic, Christian-Hermetic, late-antique Latin—is not evidence of distinct lineages preserved in parallel. It’s evidence of a single working magical practice in which those distinctions had ceased to operate.

What appears in modern reinterpretations as a Viking symbol is in fact the residue of this syncretism: a name from one tradition attached to a form from another, both made fluent by a scribal culture for which all four were equally available materials.

The same syncretism is visible outside Iceland and well into the 18th century. A Segenrolle (blessing scroll) preserved at the Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum in Innsbruck carries the SATOR-AREPO palindrome alongside a series of geometric sigil-circles in what the museum identifies as a possibly Rosicrucian milieu—symbols said to protect the bearer against illness, envy and hatred, fire, and lightning.²² That a single Tyrolean scroll holds the SATOR formula side by side with radial-arm sigil-figures formally cognate with the Icelandic Ægishjálmur family is the same fluidity the Skálholt inventory documents, attested in a different region and a later century.

By the 18th century, continental learned occultism had absorbed the full grimoire vocabulary—Solomonic seals, the Latin palindrome, galdrabók-derived staves—into a single working ritual register. The Segenrolle is not evidence of a continental substrate predating the Icelandic figure (the Lækningakver form precedes it by some two hundred years); it is evidence of the syncretic milieu in which the Ægishjálmur itself was generated, still legible far from Iceland long after.

The form’s afterlife is at least as informative as its origin—because the Ægishjálmur most now encounter is neither the medieval kenning nor the 17th-century fusion. It’s a 20th- and 21st-century reception of the early-modern figure, run through three further filters: Icelandic folklore collection, the Heathen revival, and the global merch economy.

The first filter is the late-19th-century Icelandic folklore-collection movement. Jón Árnason’s Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri (1862–64) and Ólafur Davíðsson’s Galdur og galdramál á Íslandi (1862–1903) brought the galdrabækur corpus into print and reframed it as national folklore—preserved fragments of older Icelandic imagination, valorized in the era of Romantic nationalism. The framing was already retrospective: the collectors worked from manuscript copies of material no longer actively performed. The Ægishjálmur entered the record as a curiosity of national tradition, not a working ritual stave.

The second filter is 20th-century revival. In Iceland, Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson’s founding of Ásatrúarfélagið in 1972 reactivated Old Norse religious vocabulary as the basis for a reconstructed pre-Christian practice, taking up the Ægishjálmur as emblem rather than as the early-modern grimoire stave it textually is.

In the Anglophone world, Flowers’ translation, The Galdrabók introduced the early-modern Icelandic magical corpus to a neo-pagan readership already primed to receive it as preserved Norse magic. Both receptions made the same selection: each took the latest, most-elaborated form of the figure—the 17th-century eight-spoke Galdrakver version, or Huld’s from 1847—as the tradition’s authentic image. These are precisely the forms Pagani identifies as the most developed end of an in-progress formal trajectory.²³

The third filter is the present commercial one: tattoo parlours, the Reykjavík souvenir economy, online merchandise sold as ancient Viking protective symbols. The image reproduced here is, almost uniformly, the elaborated eight-spoke Galdrakver form—never the Lækningakver original, never the intermediate Galdrabók variants. The most modern reception selects for the most developed late form, the one furthest in time from any plausibly Viking-Age origin, and labels it Viking. The misrecognition we’ve traced through the manuscripts exits through the gift shop.

What we now call Ægishjálmur, then, is a kenning that became a sigil that became a tradition that became a T-shirt—four phases of generation, each wrongly persuaded it was preserving the one before.

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Read previous articles in the Viking Esoterica series

Part 1: Runes

Part 2: Bindunes

Part 3: Magical Staves

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Notes

1. Stephen Flowers, The Galdrabók: An Icelandic Grimoire, 1989 and Icelandic Magic: practical secrets of the Northern Grimoires, 2016.
2. Fáfnismál (Fáfnir’s sayings), 18, Konungsbók (King’s Book, also known as the Codex Regia) GKS 2365 4º, ca. late 13th century, The Poetic Edda, Carolyne Larrington, trans., 1996, apart from the term ǿgishjalmr.
3. Reginsmál (Regin’s sayings), 15, Konungsbók.
4. Vǫlsunga saga, 18, the Icelandic text according to MS Nks 1824 b, 4º.
5. The Story of the Volsungs, 18, William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson, trans., 1888, my emphasis.
6. Skáldskaparmál (The language of poetry), 47, Snorra Edda (also called the Prose Edda), ca. 1220, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, trans., 1916, except the term ǿgishjalmr.
7. Vǫlsunga saga, 12; The Story of the Volsungs, 18, Morris and Magnusson, trans., 1888.
8. Ibid, 15.
9. Laxdæla saga, ca. 1230–1260, Muriel A. C. Press trans., 1880.
10. Roberto Luigi Pagani, “The Mediterranean Origin of the Galdrastafir: Tracing the Transmission of the Learned European Magical Tradition into Icelandic Popular Lore”, Gripa, 2025.
11. Pagani 2025, 245; cf. Torijano 2002, 174.
12. Ὑγρομαντεία (Hygromanteia), aka Hygromancy of Solomon, the Σολομωνική (Solomonikê), or even Little Key of the Whole Art of Hygromancy, Found by Several Craftsmen and by the Holy Prophet Solomon, 14th-15th centuries.
13. Magical treatise of Solomon, Harley 5596, fol. 33v, British Library, ca. 1450.
14. Pagani, 2025, fig. 1.
15. Lækningakver (Medical Book), AM 434 a 12°, ca. 1500.
16. Ibid, Jackson Crawford, transl. and trans., “Ægishjálmur (‘The Helm of Awe’)”, Jackson Crawford (YouTube), June 2020.
17. Galdrakver, Lbs 143 8º, 1670, Jackson Crawford, trans., “Ægishjálmur (‘The Helm of Awe’)”, Jackson Crawford (YouTube), June 2020.
18.  Galdrabók, ATA Ämb2 F 16:26 16th–17th century.
19. Pagani, 2025, fig. 6.
20. Geir Vigfússon, Huld, ÍB 383 4°, 1847.
21. Már Jónsson, ed., Galdur og guðlast á 17. öld: Dómar og bréf, 2021.
22. Segenrolle (Blessing Scroll), Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum in Innsbruck (inv. F2773), 18th century, my image.
23. Pagani, 2025.

The epic Borgesian hoax of “The Aleph”

I have often suspected that the absolute is nothing more than an acoustic accident—one mapped in the sultry tedium of Santos, and rediscovered later in the obscurity of a postscriptum no one was meant to trace.

The postscript in question is dated March first, 1943, and purports to supplement Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph”.¹ It is, of course, no such thing. Borges, ever the mischievous guide, only pretends the addition. The “postscript” was always part of the story—it’s another framing device, another misdirection.

Borges wrote in a letter to his romantic interest Alba Estela Canto in February 1945:²

Esta semana concluiré el borrador de la historia que me gustaría dedicarte: la de un lugar (en la calle Brasil) donde están todos los lugares del mundo.

This week, I will finish the draft of the story I would like to dedicate to you: the story of a place (on Brazil Street) where all the places in the world are found.

We know Borges and Canto met in August 1944, and that he subsequently described his project to write a story—clearly “The Aleph”—about:³

A place that contained all the other places in the world.

Canto typed up the manuscript Borges gave her in 1945, and it was published in Sur magazine in September of that same year.

The false postscript is not unusual. Ever since Miguel de Cervantes’ setup of the second part of Don Quixote,⁴ the pretense of discovered manuscripts, interpolated documents, and editorial afterthoughts has been one of literature’s favorite illusions. Borges leans into it with particular enthusiasm. Like Umberto Eco, who begins The Name of the Rose thus:⁵

On August 16, 1968, I was handed a book written by a certain Abbé Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en français d’après l’édition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l’Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842).

In so doing, he portrays his novel as a recovered 14th-century manuscript he is merely the translator of. Borges similarly attributes his materials to dubious intermediaries—in this case, a forgotten letter from Captain Burton discovered by Pedro Henríquez Ureña.⁶ Although each layer seems authentic, the effect is not to stabilize the story, but to send the reader off in a direction.

Sir Richard Francis Burton was a Victorian polymath, explorer, and linguist who spoke over 25 languages and lived a life of deliberate cultural camouflage. His many adventures include infiltrating Mecca in disguise and searching for the source of the Nile. His work was defined by a tireless, obsessive scholarship, filling his volumes with labyrinthine footnotes exploring the darkest and most obscure corners of human geography and linguistics.

He spent his later years as a British Consul—including in Santos, Brazil, a place he hated, calling it boring and humid—and completing his unexpurgated translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (BTNN hereafter).⁷

Borges knew his work intimately—his childhood home was an Anglo-Argentine one, and its library contained these books. They are part of his earliest experiences as a writer:⁸

His father, a frustrated novelist who had played a key role in Borges’s literary destiny, destroyed a book of Oriental stories he had written inspired in [sic] the Arabian Nights […].

In his A Universal History of Infamy (UHI hereafter), Borges presents his own translations of two tales from BTTN.⁹ And in his essay, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights” (“TTON”, hereafter), he compares various translations of the tales. He notes almost immediately:¹⁰

Burton’s incomparable version [of the Thousand and One Nights […] is not truthful […]. 

It becomes clear Borges regards BTTN with a mixture of admiration and hostility. Although he notes of his diction, “Each [word] is indubitably the mot juste”, he also says:¹¹

In Burton, the falsification […] resides in the gigantic employ of a gaudy English, crammed with archaic and barbaric words.

This ambivalence matters. Burton is not merely a source for Borges; he is a model of a certain kind of textual excess—one in which commentary threatens to overwhelm the thing it comments upon. And it is into this excess that Borges directs us.

In the postscript of “The Aleph,” the references come quickly: According to legend, Alexander the Great (Iskandar to the Persians) devised a tower-mounted mirror that reveals all within sixty farsangs, allowing his men to strike marauding pirates. The sevenfold cup of Kai Kosru (کیخسرو) refers to the Cup of Jamshid (جام جم, jām-e Jam). This Jām was a legendary cup of scrying, believed to contain the elixir of immortality and to reveal the seven heavens and reflect the entire world, uncovering hidden truths. The mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad (طارق بن زياد) found is mentioned briefly in BTNN, with similar properties, but noted as counterfeit.¹² Borges translates the same tale in UHI.¹³

True History refers to Lucian of Samosata’s second-century work hailed by some as the first work of science fiction, but which is actually a satire of travelers’ tales. We find there:¹⁴

καὶ μὴν καὶ ἄλλο θαῦμα ἐν τοῖς βασιλείοις ἐθεασάμην κάτοπτρον μέγιστον κεῖται ὑπὲρ φρέατος οὐ πάνυ βαθέος. ἂν μὲν οὖν εἰς τὸ φρέαρ καταβῇ τις, ἀκούει πάντων τῶν παρ᾽ ἡμῖν ἐν τῇ γῇ λεγομένων, ἐὰν δὲ εἰς τὸ κάτοπτρον ἀποβλέψῃ, πάσας μὲν πόλεις, πάντα δὲ ἔθνη ὁρᾷ ὥσπερ ἐφεστὼς ἑκάστοις: τότε καὶ τοὺς οἰκείους ἐγὼ ἐθεασάμην καὶ πᾶσαν τὴν πατρίδα, εἰ δὲ κἀκεῖνοι ἐμὲ ἑώρων, οὐκέτι ἔχω τὸ ἀσφαλὲς εἰπεῖν. ὅστις δὲ ταῦτα μὴ πιστεύει οὕτως ἔχειν, ἄν ποτε καὶ αὐτὸς ἐκεῖσε ἀφίκηται, εἴσεται ὡς ἀληθῆ λέγω.

I saw also another strange thing in the same court: a mighty great glass lying upon the top of a pit of no great depth, whereinto, if any man descend, he shall hear everything that is spoken upon the earth: if he but look into the glass, he shall see all cities and all nations as well as if he were among them. There had I the sight of all my friends and the whole country about: whether they saw me or not I cannot tell: but if they believe it not to be so, let them take the pains to go thither themselves and they shall find my words true.

Although I’m unsure what “spear” Borges means—sphere?—Capella’s Satyricon gives us:¹⁵

His igitur indumentis decenter ornati, ante consessum in suggestu sydereo positam quandam sphaeram caelatam varietate multipici conspicantur, quae ita ex omnibus compacta fuerat elementis, ut nihil abesset, quidquid ab omni creditur natura contineri. Illic omne caelum, aer, freta, diversitasque telluris, claustraque fuerant tartarea. Urbes etiam, compita, cunctorumque species animantium, tam in specie quam in genere numerandae. Quae quidem sphaera imago quaedam videbatur, ideaque mundi. In hac quid cuncti, quid singuli nationum omnium populi quotidianis motibus agitarent pedeire, formante speculo relucebat.

Thus fittingly adorned, they looked at a certain sphere carved with manifold variety, which was placed before their seat on a starry platform. It was composed of all elements in such a way that nothing of what is believed to be contained in the whole of nature was absent. There was the whole sky, the air, the seas, the diversity of lands, and the gates of Tartarus. Also the cities, the crossroads, and all kinds of living things counted by species and by genus. This sphere, indeed, appeared to be some kind of image and idea of the world. In the mirror so formed, one could see what all people and each individual from all peoples and all nations strove to accomplish.

And the Faerie Queene passage is also relevant:¹⁶

The great Magitien Merlin had deuiz’d,
By his deepe science, and hell-dreaded might,
A looking glasse, right woundrously aguiz’d,
Whose vertues through the wyde worlde soon were solemniz’d.
It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight,
What euer thing was in the world contaynd,
Betwixt the lowest earth and heuens hight,
So that it to the looker appertaynd;
What euer foe had wrought, or frend had faynd,
Therein discouered was, ne mote pas,
Ne ought in secret from the same remaynd;
For thy it round and hollow shaped was,
Like to the world it selfe, and seemed a world of glas.

These three precursors are presented as a single tradition: containers of total vision, each failing in roughly the same way. Read more closely, they fail in three distinct registers. Borges is not quoting a tradition; he is curating an anthology of incompatible totalities, each broken on a different axis.

True History opens by declaring its own falsehood: the apparatus of the credible travel-narrative weaponized against itself at the threshold. This makes it the direct ancestor of the Borgesian fictive-encyclopedia—“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (“TUOT”), the container is announced empty before the reader enters.¹⁷

Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii supplies a second register: the encyclopedic. The seven liberal arts, personified at the wedding of Philology and Mercury, deliver the world as the sum of its disciplines—taxonomic totality brought to discursive completion. What is contained is not space but the structured field of what may be known.

Spenser’s crystal globe in The Faerie Queene operates in the opposite key. When Britomart finds Artegall in Merlin’s mirror, the totality is not deflationary but providential—every accident is in fact a decree. The containing-glass is moral cosmology made visible: total vision as the revelation of total order.

Three registers, three failures. The satirist’s totality is true but trivializing; the encyclopedist’s, structured but inert; the moralist’s, consoling but tautological. Borges is exposing the sequence as a series of asymptotic attempts—each reaching for totality in the only shape its genre permitted, none able to reach the thing itself.

Borges strengthens the illusion by invoking what seems to be a deeper precedent, writing in “TTON”:¹⁸

Is it not portentous that on night 602 King Schahriah [شهریار] hears his own story from the queen’s lips?

This is the mise en abyme—the literary infinity—of BTTN, which Borges attempts to create his own version of in “The Aleph”. Just as Shahrazad (شهرزاد) tells the king the story of him being told the story, Borges attempts to have you read the story of you reading the story.

Italo Calvino takes up this gauntlet in his novel If on a winter’s night a traveler.¹⁹ I’ve often said, just as Dan Brown did with a single line of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, a writer could make a career of writing the tales suggested with similar brevity in Borges. In just this way, Calvino gives us a novel in second-person perspective: the story of the reader reading the story they are reading. Still, the momentary piercing of the veil we get in “The Aleph” is perhaps a better realization of the trope—the stark “I saw your face”, at the end of an exhaustive list of things appearing in the Aleph.²⁰

But the scene isn’t in BTTN. The mise en abyme Borges describes is another of his deceptions: the tale there actually tells of a prince wandering the woods alone, who comes across a woman captured by an Ifrit (عفريت). Shahrazad appears nowhere in Burton’s Night 602, her sister Dunyazad (دنیازاد) is not to be found, and there is a complete absence of newlywed virgins doomed to be decapitated at dawn.²¹

And on the page of BTNN Borges suggests in “The Aleph”, we find “The Nazarene Broker’s Story”.²² This story is not uninteresting — in fact, a tale within a tale within a tale in the style of The Saragossa Manuscript.²³ It tells of a young man who delays collecting payment from a Christian broker who sold his sesame. At last dining with him, he reveals he lost his right hand stealing after spending all his money on a woman he loved. In the end, he repays the broker in full—and gives him his fortune besides.

These are not mistakes. They are deliberate misdirections. He smuggles these not only into fiction but into “TTON”—an ostensibly nonfiction essay. The reader is invited to verify the references, to descend into Burton’s labyrinth—and to discover, eventually, the center is empty.

Even the supposed corroborations—the mirror of Lucian, the enchanted glass of Spenser—do not resolve into a single tradition so much as a proliferation of analogues. Each promises total vision. None delivers it. The pattern is not convergence, but repetition.

To follow Borges’ references seriously is to end up where they all lead: not to the tale itself, but to Burton’s apparatus—to the footnotes, the appendices. The story gestures downward, into the literal basement of the text.

There are actually 10 volumes of Burton’s BTTN—the only full translation in the English language—which he followed up with a further seven, entitled The Supplemental Nights to the Thousand Nights and a Night. Borges does not name which in his citation. However, as we know, Burton’s version is famed for its marginalia.

This brings us to Volume X. It contains the final tale of the cycle, as well as the conclusion of the frame-story of Shahrazad, but these are achieved by page 62 of the 532-page tome. The main matter of the volume is a 240-page “Terminal Essay”. Turning here to page 272, we encounter unexpectedly:²⁴

The question, therefore, arises, what is “Alif.”

The answer is, at first glance, technical. The passage discusses the translation of poetry, a topic near and dear enough to Borges he penned two essays on the topic: “Two Ways to Translate” and “The Homeric Versions”.²⁵ Here it is specifically on how to render verses from Arabic, about which Borges was especially critical of Burton in “TTON”, calling it:²⁶

[A] procedure that was unfortunate from the start, since it contradicted [Burton’s] own rule of total literalness. His ear was as greatly offended against as his sense of logic […].

The BTTN passage continues:²⁷

[Alif] is the first of the twenty-eight Arabic letters, and has, through the medium of the Greek Alpha nominally entered into our alphabet, where it now plays a rather misleading part. Curiously enough, however, Greek itself has preserved for us the key to the real nature of the letter. In Άλφα the initial a is preceded by the so-called spiritus lenis (⁠᾿), a sign which must be placed in front or at the top of any vowel beginning a Greek word, and which represents that slight aspiration or soft breathing almost involuntarily uttered, when we try to pronounce a vowel by itself.

Just as Isaac Newton famously probed his own eye socket with a bodkin to learn more about how he perceived the world before studying it, here Burton—and Borges—delve into the alphabet as a basic element of their medium. The view of the Alif Burton expresses was an old one:²⁸

Aleph non est vocalis, sed tenuissimae aspirationis nota, quae cuiusvis ex quinque vocalibus sono terminari potest. Id enim valet quod apud Graecos tenuis spiritus.

Aleph is not a vowel, but a very thin aspiration note, which can end with any of the five vowel sounds. For it is the same as the Greeks’ thin breath.

But even this is wrong, or at least outdated. Already in the same year BTTN was published, German classicist Friedrich Blass opined that the Greek term equivalent to spiritus lenis, ψιλὸν πνεῦμα (psilòn pneûma), could only mean lack of aspiration.²⁹

As I have noted previously, the Phoenicians taught their alphabet to the Greeks in the early eighth century BCE. The Phoenician alphabet was an abjad—its vowels were implicit. The Phoenician letter ʾālep ⟨𐤀⟩ representing the glottal stop /ʔ/ was repurposed in Greek as ⟨Α⟩ to represent the vowel /a/. In the same way, ⟨𐤄⟩ /h/ and ⟨𐤏⟩ /ʕ/—all consonants in Phoenician—became the Greek vowels ⟨Ε⟩ /e/ and ⟨Ο⟩ /o/, respectively.

With the spread of the Ionic alphabet, where ⟨Η⟩ (eta) was used to mark the vowel /aː/, the letter lost its earlier consonantal value. As a result, aspiration—though phonemically significant—went unmarked in writing. In some places, half the old consonantal ⟨Η⟩ was repurposed to indicate this sound and written on the line like a regular letter.

Around 200 BCE, Aristophanes of Byzantium adapted this sign, not as a full letter but as a mark (⟨ ̔⟩) placed above an initial vowel to distinguish otherwise identical words. This came to be known as δασὺ πνεῦμα (dasỳ pneûma) or spiritus asper—rough breathing.

The spiritus lenis later came to be used in opposition to this mark—i.e., an initial vowel would always be written with one or the other mark. Strange as it seems, it denotes the absence of this /h/ sound at the beginning of a word. As John C. Rolfe notes:³⁰

The pedantic practice of medieval scribes and modern printers by which one breathing or the other is written over every initial vowel does not establish a presumption that ancient Greek had a glottal stop.

As a translator of classics, Borges would have known this, thus we can see it as another cause for him to take Burton to task. The spiritus lenis does not indicate a sound at all. It marks the absence of one. A vowel without aspiration. A beginning defined by what is not there. A sign for nothing.

And this is another central theme of “The Aleph”—our instruments are flawed. Describing the simultaneity of the Aleph is impossible because of the sequential nature of language. You can see an exploration of this in the 2016 film Arrival. But by directing us to the Alif, Borges takes this to the most basic level — the flawed ability of writing to accurately represent sound.

The Aleph—the point in space that contains all other points, the place from which the entire universe may be seen simultaneously—appears to promise totality. It is introduced alongside mirrors, cups, and spheres that claim to reflect or encompass the world. It is framed by references that suggest an ancient lineage of such devices.

But each of those references is unstable. Some are counterfeit. Some are misremembered. Some are simply invented. The path they trace does not lead to a deeper truth, but to a series of dead ends. And at the end of that path, we find not a key, but a void.

Although it may seem Borges commits his deceptions merely for the pleasure of doing so, they are actually structural. He constructs a scholarly apparatus whose purpose is ultimately not to authenticate the narrative, but to destabilize it. Burton, because of his massive body of work and ridiculous erudition, provides fertile ground for Borges to sow these false seeds.

As another example of this, Borges attributes “The Mirror of Ink” in UHI to a Burton work entitled The Lake Regions of Central Africa.³¹ ³² But this book is just what it says on the tin—a travelog, with no such matter within. Borges is counting on the reader’s acceptance of the reference.

But if a reader does take that journey, what emerges is not a hidden truth beneath the text, but a demonstration: that the search for such a truth can be steered, manipulated, and ultimately frustrated.

In “TUOT”, Borges imagines a world conjured into existence by the accumulation of texts.³³ In “Death and the Compass”, the appearance of pattern leads only to destruction.³⁴ Again and again, Borges presents order itself as something constructed rather than innate and discovered. “The Aleph” is no exception.

Near the end of the story, Borges shifts registers. The Aleph, initially described in visual terms, becomes something else—something closer to an auditory phenomenon, a compression rather than an image. Again, he quotes the fictitious Burton letter:³⁵

But the aforesaid objects (besides the disadvantage of not existing) are mere optical instruments.

This pseudo-Burton goes on to suggest “the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars” of the Amr ibn al-As Mosque (مَسْجِد عَمْرِو بْنِ الْعَاصِ), in Cairo. It is true, as the Captain notes, “the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions”.³⁶ Having visited many such mosques in Central-to Southwest Asia and North Africa, I can tell you this was often the case and can be seen in the image of it. They were typically spolia from earlier Greek and Roman structures.

But here Borges is simply offering a physical journey analogous to the one his literary references sent us on. The mosque, rebuilt and expanded many times over the centuries, features a forest of columns. And, as it was initially built in the seventh century, the column in question may have been moved elsewhere or crumbled to dust.

Thus, at the center of “The Aleph”’s universe there is no infinite sphere, no perfect mirror, no all-containing point. There is only a lacuna—carefully framed, meticulously cited, and impossible to fill.

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Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”), 1945. English version, Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, trans., in collaboration with the author.
2. Estela Canto, Borges a contraluz (Silhouette of Borges), 1989. Note Williamson says the original is in English.
3. Edwin Williamson, Borges, a life, 2004.
4. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote de la Mancha, 1620.
5. Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), 1980.
6. Borges, 1945.
7. أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah (The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments), Richard Francis Burton, trans., 1888.
8. Suzanne Jill Levine, “Jorge Luis Borges and the Translators  of the Nights”, Translation Review, 2012.
9. Borges, Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy), 1935. English version, Di Giovanni, trans., 1972.
10. Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights”, 1936; the English version is from Selected Non-Fictions, Esther Allen, trans., 1999.
11. Ibid.
12. Borges, 1945.
13. Borges, 1935.
14. Λουκιανὸς ὁ Σαμοσατεύς (Lucian of Samosata), Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα (True History), ca. 167 CE, Charles Whibley, trans., 1894.
15. Martianus Minneus Felix Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury), also called De septem disciplinis (On the Seven Disciplines), or Satyricon, 1599, my translation.
16. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.ii.18–19, 1590.
17. Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, 1940, Ficciones, 1944. Hurley, trans., 1998.
18. Borges, 1936.
19. Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter’s night a traveler), 1979.
20. Borges, 1945.
21. Burton, 1888.
22. Ibid.
23. Jan Potocki, Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (The Saragossa Manuscript), 1805.
24. Burton, Vol. X, 1888.
25. Borges, “Las dos maneras de traducir” (“Two Ways to Translate”), 1926 and “Las versiones homéricas” (“The Homeric Versions”), 1932, both, collected in English in On Writing, Suzanne Jill Levine ed., 2010.
26. Borges, 1936.
27. Burton, Vol. X, 1888.
28. Theodore de Beze, Alphabetum Graecum, Cap. 1, De Literis Graecis, in genere, 1554, as reprinted by E. Drerup, Die Schulaussprache des Griechischen 1.160.
29. John C. Rolfe, “The Use of Devices for Indicating Vowel Length in Latin”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1922.
30. Ibid.
31. Borges, 1935.
32. Burton, The lake regions of Central Africa: a picture of exploration, 1860.
33. Borges, 1940.
34. Borges, “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”),1942, Ficciones, 1944, Andrew Hurley, trans., in Collected Fictions, 1998.
35. Borges, 1945.
36. Ibid.

Beethoven’s mythical temper and the origin of the Romantic roar (“Coprophony”, Addendum)

Following my article on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s use of foul language, I ran across what seemed a similar instance concerning Ludwig van Beethoven. But looking into it further, it is not the same at all.

In 1825, the critic Gottfried Weber criticized the composer’s Wellington’s Victory, thus:¹

Es sind nicht musikalische Farben, deren van Beethoven sich hier bedient, […] sondern Täuschungen der scenischen Akustik […] Kanonen-Maschinen und andere den Lärm der Schlacht nachahmende Geräusch-Instrumente […] nur kindisch und lächerlich erscheinen können.

It is not musical colors that van Beethoven makes use of here […] but rather the deceptions of scenic acoustics […] cannon machines and other noisemakers mimicking the noise of battle [… which] can only appear childish and ridiculous.

On his copy of the journal Weber’s article appeared in, Beethoven wrote:²

Ach du erbärmlicher Schuft, was ich scheiße, ist besser, als du je gedacht!

O you wretched scoundrel, what I shit is better than anything you’ve thought up.

The comment has none of the fun or rebelliousness of Mozart’s rhymes, codeswitching, or wordplay. It’s blunt and its profanity serves that purpose. One might take it instead as an example of Beethoven’s supposedly famous temper.

Let’s look into that. Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s pupil, friend, and secretary, relates one such incident:³

Beethoven war manchmal äußerst heftig. Eines Tages aßen wir im Gasthaus zum Schwanen zu Mittag; der Kellner brachte ihm eine unrechte Schüssel. Kaum hatte Beethoven darüber einige Worte gesagt, die der Kellner eben nicht bescheiden erwiederte, als er die Schüssel […] ergriff, und sie dem Kellner an den Kopf warf. Der arme Mensch […] konnte sich […] nicht helfen; die Brühe lief ihm das Gesicht herunter. Er und Beethoven schrieen und schimpften, während alle anderen Gäste laut auflachten.

Beethoven was sometimes extremely volatile. One day, we were eating at the Gasthaus zum Schwanen at noon; the waiter brought him the wrong dish. No sooner had Beethoven uttered a few words about it—to which the waiter replied quite impertinently—than he seized the dish […] and threw it at the waiter’s head. The poor man […] couldn’t defend himself; the broth ran down his face. He and Beethoven screamed and cursed, while all the other guests laughed loudly.

This is an account from someone who actually knew Beethoven, recounting it to illustrate his statement, “Beethoven was sometimes extremely volatile.” Later biographers—of whom there have been many—seem to have taken this as their license to concoct narratives of their own.

There is an oft-repeated tale of Beethoven’s so-called “first rock star” temperament that, as I’ll explain, is errant crap. It regards a falling out with his patron, Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky of Woschütz. Supposedly, with the French occupying the city, he tried to coerce the composer into playing for them. Beethoven allegedly left in a huff, destroyed a monumental bust he had of the prince, then sent a note reading:⁴

Fürsten hat es und wird es noch Tausende geben; Beethoven gibt’s nur einen.

There have been and will be thousands of princes; there is only one Beethoven.

This “quote” is nearly ubiquitous, but it’s nearly a whole-cloth fabrication. It’s noteworthy that the account it appears in was written around 45 years after Beethoven’s death, it relies on earlier anecdotal tradition, and the original letter it supposedly draws from is nicht bekannt (unknown).

What Ries actually says about this falling out is both specific and fairly tame. First, he sets up the situation thus:⁵

Im Jahre 1807 sollte Beethoven’s Oper Leonore wieder auf die Bühne gebracht werden, die bekanntlich im Jahre 1805 durchgefallen war. Die Hauptursache dieses Mißlingens war, daß sie zuerst aufgeführt wurde, als die Franzosen, und zwar erst seit kurzem, Wien besetzt hatten. Damals waren alle Musikliebhaber und reicheren Leute, welche nur immer konnten, entflohen, so daß meistens nur französische Offiziere im Theater sich einfanden.

In 1807, Beethoven’s opera Leonore was scheduled to be staged once again—an opera which, as is well known, had met with failure in 1805. The primary cause of this failure was that it had originally been performed at a time when the French—having occupied the city only shortly before—were in control of Vienna. At that time, all music lovers and wealthy citizens who were able to do so had fled, such that the theater was attended almost exclusively by French officers.

The French occupiers being philistines, a group of the composer’s friends decide to meet to help shorten the opera:⁶

Es bestand diese aus dem Fürsten, der Fürstinn […], dem Hofrathe von Collin, dem Stephan von Breuning, welche beide lektern sich über die Abkürzungen schon besprochen hatten, dann dem Herrn Meyer, erstem Bassisten, Herrn Röckel und Beethoven. Anfänglich vertheidigte dieser jeden Tact; als man sich aber allgemein dahin aussprach, daß ganze Stücke ausbleiben müßten und Herr Meyer erklärte, kein Sänger könne die Arie des Pizarro mit Effect singen, wurde Beethoven grob und aufgebracht.

The group consisted of the Prince, the Princess […], Court Councilor von Collin, and Stephan von Breuning—the latter two having already conferred regarding the cuts—as well as Mr. Meyer, the principal bass, Mr. Röckel, and Beethoven. Initially, Beethoven defended every single bar; however, when the general consensus emerged that entire sections would have to be omitted—and Mr. Meyer declared that no singer could perform Pizarro’s aria with proper effect—Beethoven became rude and irate.

Still, he eventually agreed to all the changes, and despite his more customary audiences eventually returning, never reinstated the excised passages. So it was actually a productive meeting, and Ries notes:⁷

Diese Sitzung dauerte von 7 Uhr Abends bis 2 Uhr, wo ein fröhliches Mahl die Sache beschloß.

This session lasted from seven in the evening until two in the morning, when a convivial supper brought the proceedings to a close.

Far from confirming a single detail of the mythic falling out between Beethoven and his patron, Ries gives an entirely different reason, concerning an “Andante in F”:⁸

Als Beethoven es unserm Freunde Krumpholz und mir zum erstenmale vorspielte, gefiel es uns auf’s höchste und wir quälten ihn so lange, bis er es wiederholte. Beim Rückwege, am Hause des Fürsten Lichnowsky vorbeikommend, ging ich hinein, um ihm von der neuen herrlichen Composition Beethovens zu erzählen und wurde nun gezwungen, das Stück, so gut ich mich dessen erinnern konnte, vorzuspielen.

When Beethoven first played it for our friend Krumpholz and me, we were utterly delighted by it, and we pestered him until he played it again. On my way home—passing by Prince Lichnowsky’s residence—I went inside to tell him about Beethoven’s magnificent new composition, whereupon I was compelled to play the piece myself, as best I could recall it.

After Lichnowsky learned what Ries could recall of the tune, the Prince visited Beethoven, saying he had composed a piece he wished to play for him:⁹

Der bestimmten Erklärung Beethovens, er wolle es nicht hören, ungeachtet, setzte sich der Fürst hin und spielte zu des Componisten Erstaunen einen guten Theil des Andante.

Despite Beethoven’s emphatic declaration that he did not wish to hear it, the Prince sat down and, to the composer’s astonishment, played a good portion of the Andante.

This caused a rift between Ries and the composer, who rightly deduced Lichnowsky must have learned the piece from him:¹⁰

Beethoven wurde hierüber sehr aufgebracht und diese Veranlassung war Schuld, daß ich Beethoven nie mehr spielen hörte. Denn er wollte nie mehr in meiner Gegenwart spielen und begehrte mehrmals, daß ich bei seinem Spiele das Zimmer verlassen sollte.

Beethoven became extremely incensed over this, and this incident was the reason I never heard Beethoven play again. For he refused ever to play in my presence thereafter, and on several occasions demanded that I leave the room while he was playing.

Lichnowsky knew this was his fault and attempted to intervene:¹¹

Ich hörte nachher, Lichnowsky wäre gegen Beethoven wegen seines Betragens sehr heftig geworden, da doch nur Liebe zu seinen Werken Schuld an dem ganzen Vorfalle und folglich auch an seinem Zorne sei. Diese Vorstellungen führten jedoch nur dahin, daß er nun auch der Gesellschaft nicht mehr spielte.

I later learned that Lichnowsky had confronted Beethoven quite vehemently regarding his behavior, arguing that nothing but a love for his works was to blame for the entire episode—and, consequently, for his own outburst of anger. Yet these remonstrances served only to ensure that he would no longer play for the [Prince’s] company, either.

Beethoven’s reaction here is understandable. Ries has taken a piece the composer is still working on and performed and taught it to his patron behind his back. This is Beethoven’s creation—his livelihood—of course he guards it jealously.

Certainly, Ries relates other incidents, but the only one about which he gives any real detail is that of Zum Schwanen. And even there, it’s relatable—the waiter gives him the wrong dish, then says something sassy when Beethoven points out the mix-up. That’s pretty rage inducing.

Also, as Ries and many others note, the composer’s trouble with his hearing exacerbated his grumpiness. To his brothers Kaspar Karl and Johann, Beethoven expresses his despair over his progressive deafness and imminent death:¹²

O ihr Menschen, die ihr mich für feindselig, störrisch oder misanthropisch haltet oder erkläret, wie unrecht tut ihr mir […] war ich früh genöthigt mich abzusondern, allein zu leben […].

O you people, who deem or declare me to be hostile, obstinate, or misanthropic—how unjustly you treat me! […] I was compelled to withdraw myself early, to live alone […].

Returning to Wellington’s Victory, the project was proposed to Beethoven by his friend Johann Nepomuk Mälzel. Mälzel was an inventor, engineer, and showman, specializing in musical automata. It seems he was more showman than inventor, as he is best known for purchasing the chessplaying Turk—Wolfgang von Kempelen’s fraudulent automaton—then reselling it at an absurd markup, and the mechanical metronome, whose design he essentially swiped from Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel.

Mälzel was looking for a piece for his Panharmonicon. The mechanical musical instrument could imitate many orchestral instruments as well as sounds like gunfire and cannon shots. Thus, the “deceptions of scenic acoustics” Weber complains of were actually built in from the start. Furthermore, the piece was intended to depict a massive battle—specifically, the rout of Napoleon’s army by the British.

Still, Beethoven escalated far beyond his friend’s machine’s capabilities. 100 musicians were arranged in two groups at either side of the stage as the opposing armies, with numerous percussionists, including snare drums beating orders to the soldiers, bass drums intended to simulate cannons, and ratchets for pure chaotic noise.

The piece’s premiere in 1813 was a massive spectacle: Antonio Salieri was one of the two conductors, and Giacomo Meyerbeer and Ignaz Moscheles—both famous composers themselves—joined the orchestra. And despite Weber’s feeling that music should be:¹³

[…] der reinen Tonkunst geweihten Tempel […].

[…] the temple consecrated to the pure art of notes […].

The work was so enthusiastically received by the public it had to be performed several more times. If anything about Beethoven makes him the “first rock star”, it’s this piece’s intentional auditory assault.

But far from backing away from Beethoven’s supposed excesses, fortissimi only got louder after him. Instrument designs even evolved to accommodate the need. Strings moved from gut to wire. Flutes shifted from wood to metal. The biggest shift was in the brass: new designs expanded both range and power. The result wasn’t just more sound, but a higher ceiling for what loud meant.

Some 30 years later, Louis-Hector Berlioz envisioned an ensemble of 867 musicians, saying of it:¹⁴

Dans l’agitation, il rappellerait les tempêtes des régions tropicales; il éclaterait comme un volcan. Il ferait entendre les plaintes, les murmures et les bruits mystérieux des forêts vierges, les cris, les prières, les chants de triomphe ou de deuil d’un peuple à l’âme expansive, au cœur ardent, aux passions fougueuses. Son silence même imposerait par sa solennité, et les tempéraments les plus rebelles frémiraient à l’aspect de son crescendo montant, comme au rugissement d’un immense et sublime incendie.

When in a state of agitation, it would recall tropical storms. It would erupt like a volcano. It would convey the laments, whispers, and mysterious sounds of virgin forests, the shouts, prayers, songs of triumph or lamentation of a people with an expansive soul, an ardent heart, and fiery passions. Its silence would strike awe through its solemnity, and the most recalcitrant temperaments would shudder at the sight of its surging crescendo, like the roar of an immense and sublime conflagration.

Though not quite achieving this ambition, the composer’s Symphonie fantastique heads in this direction. The fifth movement crescendos with a surge of overwhelming volume, including a pair of large church bells.

​This is the true legacy of Beethoven’s “childish” battle music. While Wellington’s Victory may have been intended as a crowd-pleasing gimmick, it actually shattered the existing acoustic ceiling. By demanding greater physical power than a standard orchestra could provide, Beethoven paved the way for the auditory onslaught that became the Romantic standard. And the musical world has been pumping up the volume ever since.

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Read the original Article

Coprophony

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Notes

1. Gottfried Weber’s, “Über Tonmalerei” (“On Tone-Painting”), Cäcilia: eine Zeitschrift für die musikalische Welt (Caecilia: A Journal for the Musical World), 1825, my translation. The work he’s referring to is Ludwig van Beethoven, Wellingtons Sieg (Wellington’s Victory, Op. 91), often called the “Battle Symphony”, 1813.
2. Beethoven’s personal copy of Cäcilia, H. C. Bodmer Collection, HCB V8, my translation.
3. Franz Gerhard Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries, Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven (Biographical Notes on Ludwig van Beethoven), 1838, my translation.
4. Franz Xaver Boch, Wiener Deutsche Zeitung (The Viennese German Gazette), August 1873.
5. Wegeler and Ries, 1838.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Beethoven, Heiligenstädter Testament (Heiligenstadt Testament), October 1802, my translation.
13. Weber, 1825.
14. Louis-Hector Berlioz, Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (Grand Treatise on Instrumentation and Modern Orchestration), 1844, my translation.

When Japan danced to the enemy’s music (Taishō, Part 6)

In earlier articles in this series, I’ve argued the Taishō era (大正時代, 1912–1926) occupies a unique place in Japanese history.

As another way to understand how drastic the culture shift was, consider the grandparents of a child born at the era’s dawn lived in the Edo period’s (江戸時代, 1603-1867) closed feudal society, governed by a strict Confucian hierarchy. That child, on the other hand, was likely to move from the countryside to Tōkyō (東京), work in a factory, and listen to jazz.

As previously noted, Japan benefited economically from World War I. The mechanism for this was international commerce, through which they also became a major consumer of both material objects and intangible items from Europe and America. Thus, Japanese society underwent rapid globalization. Some approved:¹

[Writer] Nitobe [Inazō (新渡戸 稲造)] implored his countrymen to abandon a stubborn fondness for the particularistic ethics of the past. Instead, he argued, the Japanese had to visualize themselves as possessing attitudes, values, and behaviors that were the common property of all peoples who made up the emerging democratic and capitalist world order.

Others shunned foreign influence, such that early-twentieth-century Japanese  were torn between the imported and the domestic, often termed the double life:²

The double life is at best an expense and an inconvenience, we are told, and at worst a torment, leading to crises of identity and such things.

The soundtrack to this cultural schism was decidedly jazz—jazz resounding from multitudinous cafés on the neon-lit streets of Ginza (銀座). The divides jazz created mirrored those in the political and cultural realms of the Taishō era. Your stance on jazz defined you—you either embraced its cosmopolitan pulse or rejected it as a decadent invasion of traditional values.

From the 1910s on, jazz came to Japan via its port cities from both foreign and Japanese musicians working on ocean liners. It was just as identifiable as the other emblems of the global style of the mobo and moga (モボ; “modern boys”, モガ; “modern girls”): flapper hairstyles, short dresses, bell-bottoms, haikara (ハイカラー; high collars), and round-rimmed roido spectacles (ロイド, named for American silent film star, Harold Lloyd), even using the zūja-go argot (ズージャ語; “jazzese”) to signal in-group membership:³

Clearly, in the 1920s jazz was conspicuous evidence for the emergence of an Americanized global culture, and thus was a favorite target of nationalist assaults wherever a trumpet bent a blue note. Ultimately concerns over the nation’s cultural identity and its status in the new world order provided the subtext for Japan’s early experience of jazz. The widely held belief that jazz music itself was not a mere byproduct but rather an agent of cultural transformation—engendering what social critic Ōya Sōichi called a “culture of the senses”—was born from anxieties that many Japanese felt regarding their nation’s ever-shifting self-image.

As to the cafés, I mentioned in Part 2B, European-style cafés began appearing with Café Printemps (カフェー・プランタン) in 1911. By 1939, there were some 37,000, concentrated mainly in Ginza—dubbed the Paris of the East (東洋のパリ; Tōyō no Pari).⁴ Originally intended as places writers and painters could gather and discuss art, some transitioned easily to become jazu-kissa (ジャズ喫茶; jazz cafés), the first such being Tōkyō’s Blackbird (ブラックバード) in 1929. In addition to the other elements of cafés, jazu-kissa played the latest records on gramophones for their clientele.

Already by mid-Taishō, Japan’s urban middle class was firmly in the grip of dansu netsu (ダンス 熱; “dance fever”). Modan (モダン; moderns) were required to know how to one-step, two-step, and fox-trot. In 1923, US music magazine Metronome reports:⁵

The Japanese are jazzing by day and by night. […] Foreign dancing undoubtedly has come to stay. It is much in evidence in Tokio and has spread into Yokohama, Osaka and Kobe, although not to any extent outside of the big cities.

The article goes on to discuss some reservations, including those of Harvard graduate Dr. Takuma Dan:⁶

I approve of the mixed dancing, but we have to go slow. It is dangerous for our young girl, brought up in the purely Japanese way, and who therefore never sees outsiders except in a formal way. She has been taught that she must embrace no man except her husband. It is confusing and dangerous. But to the girl who has had a foreign education, who has spent two or three years in the United States, it is all right. She has got the spirit of the thing and it is good. It allows a proper opportunity for the sexes to meet before marriage as Americans do. Our marriage arrangements will be the last of our customs to change. We are adopting very fast all sorts of Western customs and practices, but parents will arrange the marriages of their children for a long time yet. The so-called love matches which now occasionally take place are rarely happy. My son goes to dances. My daughters have not learned as yet—they are all married and have their duties.

What Dan is describing—perhaps without meaning to—is the mechanism. Jazz didn’t threaten Japanese culture through its speed or its Americanness. It threatened it through the body. To dance is to touch across a social boundary that Edo-period propriety held inviolable. The cultural transformation wasn’t happening in concert halls or on radio waves. It was happening one fox-trot at a time, in the physical space between two people who’d been taught that space was sacred.

Nonetheless, it should also be clear those consuming foreign culture and embracing modernity were a subculture, often villainized and harassed:⁷

For most of the twentieth century, in fact, jazz folk were singled out as inimical to the national project of nurturing and preserving Japan’s cultural ‘‘essence,’’ even if that essence was subject to constant reformulation as circumstances dictated.

If jazz’s arrival in Japan needed a single dramatization, it got one—and fittingly, the medium was itself an import. Gosho Heinosuke’s (五所平之助) 1931 film, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (『マダムと女房』; Madamu to Nyōbō) is Japan’s first feature-length talkie, using the technology  of the double life to depicting it. The film doesn’t just capture the situation. It is the situation.

First, it’s important to note the English translation of the title is wildly misleading. The literal translation would be The Madam and the Wife, which I can understand avoiding. Also, the neighbor in question definitely seems unmarried. Madamu was a term of the café scene of early 20th century Japan. It is related to moga, but implies a more sophisticated and financially independent version of the Westernized, progressive woman—specifically, the manager of a café. In English, the word has the connotation of a proprietress as well, but unfortunately of a brothel, hence the awkward rendering of the title. The madamu of this film, meanwhile, clearly runs a jazu-kissa.

Kitamura Komatsu’s (北村 小松) script is self-referential, if not autobiographical, featuring a playwright—a field Kitamura studied at Keiō University (慶應義塾大学; Keiō Gijuku Daigaku)—struggling to meet his deadline. The screenwriter attended this prestigious Tōkyō school after his rural upbringing in Aomori (青森), at the northern tip of Japan’s main island. The cultural whiplash Kitamura must’ve felt is mirrored in that of the film’s protagonist.

As a point of personal connection, Keio later moved its main campus to Hiyoshi, Yokohama (日吉, 横浜). This is the town I lived and worked in, designing games for Kōei (光栄), whose name comes—in zūja-go fashion—from a reversal of the vowels of the school’s name.

In The Madam and the Wife, Shibano Shinsaku (芝野 新作, played by Watanabe Atsushi; 渡辺 篤) rents a house as a quiet place to complete his play. It doesn’t work out as planned—he is constantly disturbed by various noises, particularly a neighbor (i.e., the madamu, Yamakawa Takiko; 山川 滝子, played by Date Satoko; 伊達 里子) playing loud jazz music. The following exchange ensues:⁸

Shibano: Hey. Go next door and tell the band to stop playing.
[Shibano] Kinuyo [played by Tanaka Kinuyo; 田中 絹代]: I can’t make such a selfish request.
Shibano: Go tell them they’re disturbing the whole neighborhood.
Kinuyo: Who cares? It’s jazz. You should do your work at that tempo.
Shibano: Idiot! Can’t you see I’m suffering?

When Shibano goes himself to complain, Yamakawa invites him in to meet the band and join the party. After a drink loosens him up, the playwright begins to appreciate their Western music. Soon, he is singing and dancing enthusiastically to “The Age of Speed” (『スピード時代』; “Supīdo Jidai”) keeping the beat by tapping his glass with a spoon, then using a slapstick. At the end of the song he declares:⁹

That was great! It got me all fired up.

When he returns home, Kinuyo is displeased at his intoxicated state and jealous of him spending time with the “modan garu” at the party. She calls her “dangerous” and her Western clothes “suggestive” and “erotic”, but later admits she wants “a dress like that”. Shibano replies only:¹⁰

Writers fee: 500 yen. Actions speak louder than words. 

The film could easily have been subtitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jazz—an allegory on being less rigid and embracing modernity. The Shibano family is depicted as rather formal at the beginning of the film. Tanaka has the distinctive rural accent of her native Yamaguchi (山口), Honshu’s (本州) westernmost province—funnily at the very opposite end of the island to the screenwriter. They also wear traditional clothing and Mrs. Shibano is elaborately coiffed.

Additionally, at the outset, the protagonist is a bit of a jerk: He insults a painter’s work—even calling him a rumpen (“loafer”; ルンペン)—and gets into a fistfight with him. He plays mājan (麻雀; mahjong) with his friends until after midnight, with his deadline looming and the household running low on money—and it’s clear he’s missed deadlines before. The Shibano marriage is clearly strained.

In the film’s epilogue, after being inspired by jazz, Shibano has clearly completed his work on time. The family is happily returning from a trip to a department store, many purchases in hand. Their look is more modan, with the playwright and his daughter in Western attire, and his wife’s hair in finger waves. The whole family enjoys one another’s company. Nearing home, they hear their neighbor’s band strike up “My Blue Heaven”. They agree it’s great and happily sing along together as the credits roll.¹¹

The rosy view presented by a group of artsy filmmaking urbanites, however, was still far from that of the increasingly reactionary and nationalistic government. The Tokkō (特別高等警察; Special Higher Police), established in 1911, and 1925’s Public Security Preservation Law (治安維持法) saw widespread surveillance of cafés and dance halls and censorship of radio waves and movie theaters. Finally, in autumn 1937, the Home Ministry seized  the authority to regulate jazz venues, declaring:¹²

[T]he existence of dance halls and dance schools, which rebel against our national conditions, disturb womanhood, encourage frivolity in our youth, and exert not a little bad influence on the nation’s public morality [is] truly undesirable.

Well before war with America began in earnest, jazz was declared “the enemy’s music” (敵性音楽; tekisei ongaku). But this genie couldn’t be put back in the bottle.

As a mark of how inseparable from Japanese culture jazz had become by the early ’30s, in an article addressed “To Our Brothers and Sisters in the Village”, one rural paper questioned their country’s military adventurism:¹³

Manchuria is now Japan’s possession, but has your life changed? Has it become any easier? Have you been able to pay back any of the capital you have borrowed? Have your sisters been able to make one kimono, or your brothers go to a cafe to listen to jazz? I know the answer: it is a resounding “No!”

The pairing here is an indictment. These aren’t cosmopolitan urbanites lamenting a missed night at the Blackbird. They’re rural villagers, who want jazz for the same reason they want kimono—both represent the prosperity the imperial project promised and failed to deliver. Jazz has become an economic aspiration, not a cultural preference. By 1932, it’s as Japanese as the kimono it sits beside.

During the war, jazz simply hid behind other names—keiongaku (軽音楽; “light music”) and saron myūjikku (サロンミュージック; “salon music”). This relabeling is the most telling detail in Japan’s relationship with jazz.

The music didn’t change. The arrangements didn’t change. The audiences didn’t change. Only what you were allowed to call it changed.

The state, with the power to close dance halls and censor radio, could not actually remove jazz from Japanese culture—only from the language used to describe it. The transformation the nationalists feared had already happened. They also lost this futile naming war.

Japanese musicians returned to performing openly and American artists soon followed. By 1953, DownBeat magazine described Louis Armstrong’s SRO extended tour of the country thus:¹⁴

Receiving the largest guarantee of anyone who had ever visited Japan, Louis earned an average of $2,500 per night as against fifty percent of the gross. There was also prepaid round trip transportation for a party of 12. Before the unit left the States, they’d received four weeks advanced [sic] salary ($72,000) […]

Armstrong himself marvelled:¹⁵

Japan—how many people would think the Japanese would dig our music the way they did?

For anyone who knew them, it was obvious. They’d been digging it for 30 years—through the cafés, the dance halls, and the wartime pseudonyms. The enemy’s music had become, simply, music. And Dr. Dan’s daughters, or their daughters, had learned mixed dancing.

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Read previous articles in the Taishō series

Part 1: Japan’s Turbulent Taishō

Part 2A: Epochal Architecture

Part 2B: When Tokyo Moved West

Part 3A: Asakusa Movies

Part 3B: Asakusa Opera

Part 4: The Mysteries of Zūja-Go

Part 5: “Alice” as Taishō Nansensu

Part 5 Addendum: Shōjo, Kawaii, and the Girl Who Refused to Grow Up

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Notes

1. John L. McClain, Japan: A Modern History, 2001.
2. Edward Seidensticker, History of Tokyo 1867-1989 From Edo to Showa: The Emergence of the World’s Greatest City, 2019.
3. E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan, 2001.
4. Michael Hoffman, “The Taisho Era: When modernity ruled Japan’s masses”, The Japan Times, July 2012.
5. Grace Thompson Seton, “The Jazzing Japanese”, Metronome, January 1923.
6. Ibid.
7. Atkins, 2001.
8. 『マダムと女房』 (The Madam and the Wife), 1931, English subtitles.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted in 永井良和 (Nagai Yoshikazu), 『社交ダンスと日本人』 (Shakō dansu to Nihonjin; Social Dance and the Japanese), 1991.
13. 小浦 初美 (Koura Hatsumi), 「農村 の 兄弟 へ」 (“Noson no kyodai e”; “To Our Brothers and Sisters in the Village”), 『神科 時報』 (Kamishina Jihō; Kamishina Times), May 1932, quoted in McClain, 2001.
14. “Pops’ Japan Tour a Smash”, DownBeat, January 1954.
15. Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years, 2011.

Clan lords and intertubes (Interactive Storytelling, Part 3 Addendum)

In this series’ previous entry, there was another important element in the demise of the adventure genre I should have discussed: the advent of the internet.

When there was no internet, if you were playing Sam & Max Hit the Road, and got stuck, there weren’t a lot of options open to you. The main one was calling LucasArts’ Hint Line and paying 1.99 USD per minute for help.

The internet was opened to the public in 1991, and by 1993, it started actually being used as such. America Online’s carpet-bombing strategy of distributing free trial disks came the same year. Quake allowed multiplayer online matches via the internet in 1997, a year before Grim Fandango’s release.

The problems this posed for adventure games were manifold: walkthroughs appeared online nearly as soon as someone solved the game, meaning tip-line revenue dried up. But these were symptoms of a deeper vulnerability. The walkthrough problem only matters if your game has exactly one path through it—a single chain of solutions the player either finds or doesn’t.

Adventure games weren’t just susceptible to walkthroughs; they were structurally defined as walkthroughs. The entire genre was a sequence of gates with a single key each, and once someone published the key ring, the game collapsed into a to-do list.

Most importantly, the genre was feeling long-in-the-tooth compared to other offerings and needed not just an evolution, but a revolution.

There were attempts to address this—mine among them. By the time I was designing quests like The Cairn Stones in Diablo II, I was very aware of the walkthrough problem. My solution was to use the procedural generation system already used to generate dungeons and many other elements of the game. In the Cairn Stones quest, the order of both the scroll’s solution and the stones themselves are randomized. Your solution won’t necessarily be the same as another player’s, and a walkthrough will do you no good.

By the time I was designing quests like The Cairn Stones in Diablo II, I was very aware of the issue. It’s for this reason I used the procedural generation already used to generate dungeons, and many other elements. In the Cairn Stones quest, the order of both on the scroll and the stones are randomized. This means the solution to your stones won’t necessarily be the same as another player’s and a walkthrough will do you no good.

The much more elaborate puzzles in the adventure genre, however, did not lend themselves well to such design solutions. Escape from Monkey Island included the “Monkey Kombat” subgame, wherein “monkey words” each defeated two others in rock-paper-scissors fashion. Which defeated which was randomized, requiring exploration to solve. But it felt tedious rather than fun and was one of the most hated elements of the game.

Both were the same strategy with different execution: make the solution non-transferable. Cairn Stones works because the randomization sits atop simple physical action—touch the stones in order. You don’t need to understand why the sequence works, just that it works. Monkey Kombat fails because it asks the player to reconstruct the entire logic table through trial and error, which is tedious with or without a walkthrough.

But even the good version of this fix didn’t touch the deeper problem. I felt actual puzzle gameplay was outside what made sense for Diablo II, so Cairn Stones was really just lock-and-key—get the scroll, have it translated, and use it on the stones. Even still, a player could just keep clicking the stones and hit on the solution fairly easily. Randomizing the solution was a tactical fix for a structural vulnerability. The genre didn’t need unpredictable answers. It needed better questions.

I had to face that structural problem head-on when I joined the strike team for WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans (WCA).

In Blizzard’s parlance of the time, a strike team was a group from one studio tapped to look at another’s first playable, give feedback, and make recommendations. I did this for StarCraft, then joined the team to continue in this role right up to its successful launch. WCA was less fortunate.

While Diablo revitalized a supposedly dead genre, we did so by making significant changes to it, removing the P&P RPG cruft in favor of a quick-to-the-fun experience that still had a ton of depth to explore. WCA brought nothing new to the table. One reviewer of a leaked section of gameplay hit the nail on the head, calling it:¹²

[A] conventional, borderline dull point-and-click adventure [… that] doesn’t quite feel like Warcraft.

That second clause is the sharper observation. It didn’t feel like WarCraft because the adventure genre’s core verbs—find the item, combine it with the other item, use it on the thing—are fundamentally wrong for the IP. WarCraft’s native verbs are faction navigation and political violence. WCA as a story is about Thrall moving through systems of power: slavery, gladiatorial combat, clan politics, the formation of identity under pressure. That material wants dialogue, alliance-building, and consequential choices—not “use rope with bucket”.

Every time the designers reached for a traditional adventure puzzle, they were translating a political story into a mechanical language that couldn’t carry it. The adventure verbs atomize the world into discrete inventory objects; Thrall’s story is about navigating webs of loyalty and coercion. These are not complementary impulses.

Despite Blizzard’s protests to the contrary, the playable really was that bad. For these reasons, I lobbied hard for the game’s cancellation. I was pleased to have eventually convinced Blizzard’s leadership a mercy killing was the best course of action.

But the mercy killing, correct as it was, raises a question worth sitting with: what would an internet-native adventure game actually have looked like in 1998?

Not randomized puzzles—that’s the tactical fix again, treating the symptom rather than the disease. The structural fix—like Diablo II’s skill system—would have been to make each player’s experience genuinely unique, so that walkthroughs merely describe someone else’s game. Not unpredictable answers, but a possibility space where the path itself varies.

This isn’t hypothetical. The same year WCA was cancelled, Planescape: Torment (PT) shipped. It wasn’t an adventure game in the LucasArts mold, but it demonstrated the shape the genre needed. It was dialogue-heavy, systemically branching, and walkthrough-resistant not because its puzzles were randomized, but because your Nameless One wasn’t mine. Your choices, your stats, your conversational paths through Sigil produced a version of the game that no FAQ could fully map. The genre’s evolution wasn’t about making the lock harder to pick. It was about replacing the lock with a conversation.

WCA had an IP that could have supported exactly this structure. Thrall navigating orc clan politics, earning trust or forcing compliance, building an identity from nothing—that’s a branching-dialogue game, not a puzzle-chain game. PT proved the format could work. The WarCraft IP had the characters, the factional complexity, and the emotional stakes to fill it. What was missing wasn’t the opportunity but the willingness to abandon the adventure genre’s assumptions about what a game in that space should look like.

I’d have enjoyed working in the genre and taking on the challenge of innovating it for the internet age. But by the time the strike team was done, it was clear that WCA wasn’t trying to innovate—it was trying to execute a form that had already expired. We made the right call. What died with it was the chance to show that the adventure genre could mutate rather than just go extinct.

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Read previous articles in the Interactive Storytelling series

Part 1: Lizzie’s Game

Part 2: Those Frumious Jaws

Part 3: Hijinx and Deconstruction

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Notes

1. Wes Fenlon, “The inside story of Warcraft Adventures: Blizzard’s lost point-and-click adventure”, PC Gamer, December, 2016.

The strange origins and permutations of Aladdin (DeDisneyfication, Part 12)

Aladdin (علاء الدين, “Alāʼu d-Dīn”) isn’t merely the best-known of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights (أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah, OTON hereafter), it’s emblematic of it to the point of being synecdochical.

And yet, if you consider the actual corpus of those tales, it’s an odd one. 

First, there’s the fact it’s set in China. This may seem surprising given the Southwest Asian associations of OTON, but many authors, translators, and scholars collected the work over many centuries from South and West Asia and North Africa.

Some tales trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, and even Mesopotamian literature. Most tales, however, were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, come from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (هزار افسان), and may ultimately be translations of still older Indian texts.

Additionally, to the original audience of the tale, China represented a distant, exotic land associated with wealth, mystery, and magnificence. While Chinese cities like Chang’an were widely renowned for their grandeur, ordinary people wouldn’t have access to the details. Instead, the names in the “China” of Aladdin are Arabic and Persian, and other cultural markers—the Sultan, the vizier, and the genie—similarly draw on Southwest Asian traditions.

In fact, Aladdin shares its origin with only 10 other tales in the original European publication of OTON. These can be traced to Hanna Diyab (اَنْطون يوسُف حَنّا دِياب), a Maronite Christian from Aleppo, who told the stories to French writer Antoine Galland in the early 18th century. Galland, who was translating OTON into French, included Aladdin in his collection despite the tale not being part of the original Arabic manuscript.

All three of the best-known tales of OTON are absent from the original canon. Of these, two can be traced to Diyab—Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (علي بابا والأربعون لصا, Ali Baba wal Arba’in Lisa), while Sindbad the Sailor (سندباد البحري, Sindibādu l-Bahriyy) is its own cycle apparently deriving from travellers’ tales of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258).

The other OTON tales transmitted directly to Galland by Diyab are:

• Alī Khawājā and the Merchant of Bagdad
• The Ten Viziers
• The Ebony Horse
• The Sultan of Samarkand and His Three Sons
• Khawājā Hasan al-Habbāl
• The Caliph’s Night Adventures
• Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Perī-Bānū
• Sīdī Nuʿmān
• The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Cadette
• Blind Man Bābā ʿAbdallāh

Following Galland’s inclusion of Aladdin in his version of OTON, the story gained immense popularity and underwent various adaptations, also being translated into Arabic and included in subsequent versions of OTON as if it had always been there.

Aladdin became a staple in Western literature, with numerous translations and retellings throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, eventually finding its way into the realm of theater and film. The 1924 film The Thief of Bagdad, while not a direct adaptation of Aladdin, drew heavily on its themes and aesthetics, influencing subsequent interpretations.

In 1992, Disney released its animated film Aladdin, falling just past the apex of the Disney Renaissance.

True to the Disney pattern, they chose a beloved tale with dozens of retellings to crib from. They threw out most of the plot apart from a few key elements—the lamp and the genie—and grafted on new characters and story elements. Where the original has Aladdin as a poor tailor’s idle son, the animation studio makes him a thief with a heart of gold. The strong-willed and independent Princess Jasmine is also reimagined from Princess Badroulboudour (بدر البدور Badru l-Budūr—full moon of full moons), whose key attribute is her beauty.

Agrabah, in fact, was intended to be Baghdad, the name being a near-anagram. This was almost certainly a legacy of The Thief of Baghdad. The film’s timing, however, between the Gulf Wars, rendered that location more toxic than exotic. But just as Diyab’s version of China was entirely imagined, so too was Disney’s version of Baghdad. The difference is Diyab projected his own culture onto a romanticized location, while Disney presented a vague amalgamation of Southwest and South Asian cultures, freighting it with all the stereotyped, exoticized baggage of centuries of Western imperialism.

As is typical of Disney films, there is clear bad-guy coding—ethnic accents and “foreign” features, in this case, large aquiline noses. The nose thing seems to have been so essential to the portrayal of villains in the film it inspired Jafar’s (Jonathan Freeman) henchman Iago (Gilbert Gottfried) being a parrot, so having a literal beak.

Notably, these two main baddies break the mold accent-wise. Jafar speaks in a posh English accent—another bad guy trait common across Disney films. Gottfried, of course, sounds like himself, but is there for comedic value, so it makes sense.

Of course, there is also good-guy coding—American accents, Westernized features. For example, Aladdin’s (Scott Weinger) appearance and personality are modeled on Tom Cruise.¹

These elements, coupled with repeated references to chopping off various bits of people’s anatomy, seem to have slipped by the “number of Arab scholars and consultants” Disney consulted during production.² In turn, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee complained about the portrayal of its people in the film. The animation studio responded by Band-Aiding the video release with a two-line rewrite of “Arabian Nights”’ lyrics.

And while Robin Williams’ performance as Genie was clearly a strength of the film, it gave rise to trends that are not so great. The first is the move toward using so-called named talent in animation.

The Golden Age of American Animation was populated with giants like Mel Blanc, who literally voiced most of the iconic Warner Bros. characters of the era, from Yosemite Sam to Tweety Bird. The Simpsons is a notable remaining bastion, with only six voice actors playing 30-odd main characters.

Williams, too, was a talented mimic capable of dozens of voices. He was respectful of the tradition of voice acting in animation as well, and was hesitant to accept the role, finally agreeing with the understanding his name would not be used in Aladdin’s marketing.

But studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, having already begun the named talent escalation, casting Vincent Price in The Great Mouse Detective, and Joey Lawrence, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, and Huey Lewis in Oliver & Company, couldn’t not exploit Williams’ box office draw. While not actually naming Williams in their advertising for the film, Disney used his voice and the Genie character in all of it, as well as for every manner of merchandise. There was little Williams could do:³

[He…] accused Disney executives of lying to him and breaching an agreement not to use his voice to merchandise products. The feud went on for a year, finally ending after Katzenberg left the studio and his replacement, Joe Roth, formally apologized.

Regardless, the film was a massive BO smash, yielding 20× its budget—504.1M USD. Nor did subsequent actors have the qualms Williams did about attaching their names to animated films. So, as film critic Lindsay Ellis notes:⁴

[L]essons were learned from the success of Aladdin. Cynical, cheap lessons. We saw it begin to some degree with The Lion King, and then more with Pocahontas (Mel Gibson was one of the biggest stars in the world at the time), but then after that, starting with the ones that were seriously in production after Aladdin was released, every Disney movie had a Genie knockoff featuring some extremely bankable comedic talent.

The other trend sparked by Williams’ portrayal of Genie came from his heavy use of contemporary pop-cultural references. While inherent to his comedic stylings, and even the reason for his success, Disney, and indeed Hollywood writ large’s takeaway was to copy and paste. Such references became a substitute for original humor, relying on the audience’s recognition of other media rather than creating jokes rooted in the story itself. Ellis describes the trend thus:⁵

[I]n a post-Shrek celebrity-driven animated feature world, well [this type of humor]’s not all there is, but in terms of sheer volume, it’s most of it.

One specific instance of this can be scrutinized: In Aladdin, Genie is playing chess with Carpet (yes, that’s the flying carpet’s name), who takes one of his pieces. Genie morphs into a caricature of Rodney Dangerfield, complete with a necktie he loosens nervously, and delivers the line, also in an impression of the comedian:⁶

I can’t believe it—I’m losing to a rug!

Is it funny? Reasonably so: Dangerfield’s Borscht-Belt one-liners were characteristically self-deprecating, so this fits the pattern. Disney seems to have seen as a high-water mark, as there’s even a high-end official figurine called “I’m Losing to a Rug” capturing the scene. This apparently also led to a reprise of the gag four years on in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo the gargoyle (Jason Alexander) is playing poker with a pigeon, and utters the immortal laff line:⁷

I’m losing to a bird!

Unlike its forebear, this has been broadly mocked. Apart from the Aladdin precedent, nothing about the gag makes sense. I’ve mentioned the gargoyles before. Ellis says of them:⁸

Most people’s post-mortem will agree that the centrality of these cartoonishly grotesque gargoyles in a dark and serious story did far more harm than good […].

Where Carpet is clearly sentient, there is no logic to a gargoyle and a pigeon playing poker—beyond them both existing at the top of the cathedral—let alone the pigeon winning. Giving Disney the benefit of the doubt, the link might be that George Costanza of Seinfeld, also played by Alexander, is a loserly character like Dangerfield’s comedy persona. Uncharitably, it’s just a poorly recycled gag.

Such recycled gags have become Disney’s stock-in-trade, signaling which is the case. To keep picking on Hunchback, here’s a far-from-complete list, just of gags in the film with references external to the film’s world:

• Belle walks down a street
• A Parisian has Carpet draped over his arm
• Clopin’s “Court of Miracles” dance refers to “L’apprenti sorcier” (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”)
• Esmeralda (Demi Moore) is presented essentially as an exotic dancer, referring to the actress’ role in Striptease
• The gargoyles’ names refer to the book’s author and one of the Andrews sisters
• The Goofy yell is heard
• The entire “A Guy Like You” number—the gargoyles play with absurd props like neon signs, wedding cakes, and other modern paraphernalia throughout the song, and Hugo strikes an Elvis Presley-esque pose
• Jafar’s old man disguise is used
• The crowd carries Pumbaa on a stick
• Quasi (Tom Hulce) trying on wigs makes reference to his role in Amadeus

Though obviously hyperbolic, one meme gif even cites Hugo as “the death of comedy” overall, not merely in Disney Animation Studio films.

The 1994 Aladdin sequel, Return of Jafar, marks the beginning of Disney’s direct-to-video strategy and, according to media analyst Matthew Ball, the beginning of the end of the Disney Renaissance.⁹ Williams doesn’t appear in it, and it does nothing memorable with the world of Aladdin, but it was certainly effective monetarily.

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Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication Series

Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”

Part 2: Making over “Mulan”

Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak

Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes

Part 3B: Doing Hera’s Work on “Hercules”

Part 4: Tale As Old As Agriculture

Part 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

Part 7A Addendum B: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins’ War

Part 7B Addendum: Repainting the Roses

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Part 11: Batmouse 3D

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Notes

1. David Koenig, Mouse under glass: secrets of Disney animation & theme parks, 1997.
2. John Evan Frook, “‘Aladdin’ lyrics altered”, Variety, July 1993.
3. Koenig, 1997.
4. Lindsay Ellis, “How Aladdin Changed Animation (by Screwing Over Robin Williams)”, Lindsay Ellis (YouTube), May 2019.
5. Ellis, 2019.
6. Aladdin, 1992.
7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996.
8. Ellis, “The Case for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, Lindsay Ellis (YouTube), October 2017.
9. Matthew Ball, “What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter?”, MatthewBall.co, May 2021.