Author: Stieg Hedlund

Sator as linguistic destiny (Sator Square, Part 6)

Just as the discovery of the second Pompeian Rotas square in 1936 effectively foreclosed the historicity of a Christian solution, the meaninglessness of the Sator square—which should have ended debate altogether—has been discovered three times, by three scholars working independently, over the course of four years. Each time the finding was ignored. The history of this non-discovery is itself revealing—it tells you something about what happens when one gazes too long into the abyss of the square.

In 1965, Margherita Guarducci—the epigrapher who had published graffiti beneath the Vatican from the late third century written by people who believed they were at the tomb or shrine of Peter—published a study calling the Sator square uno scherzo grafico: “a graphic joke”. Her method was counter-anagram. She rearranged the same 25 letters into Satanic invocations and showed that the grid’s letters could produce devil-worship even better than the Lord’s Prayer. If the same raw material yields opposite messages with equal ease, the material carries no message. The response was silence.¹

Three years later, Paul Veyne arrived at the same conclusion from a different direction, making the argument methodological. Because the letters in this palindrome are so common, you can easily rearrange them into dozens of other meaningful phrases. He generated a flood of counter-readings in Latin, and as we saw in Part 2, Veyne constructed from the same twenty-five letters a second cross—PORTAE NOSTRAE—geometrically identical to Grosser’s PATERNOSTER, crossing at the shared ⟨N⟩.² If the method that finds one cross finds two, the method proves nothing. His verdict:³

le palindrome existe et l’anagramme n’existe pas—c’est nous qui la faisons exister.
The palindrome exists and the anagram does not; it is we who bring it into existence.

Again, silence.

Then, in 1969, Charles Douglas Gunn submitted a doctoral dissertation to Yale that proved the point by a third route—not linguistic this time, but computational.⁴

Gunn compiled a dictionary of more than two thousand Latin five-letter words and wrote a computer program to generate every possible 5×5 word square with the same fourfold symmetry as the Sator—the same word reading across, down, and both reversed.

The central “cross” requires a word that is itself palindromic. There are only 43 of these that are five letters long:⁵

AEAEA, AENEA, AEREA, INANI, MACAM, MADAM, MAGAM, MAIAM, MALAM, MANAM, MURUM, MUTUM, REFER, RENER, ROBOR, ROGOR, ROROR, ROTOR, SAGAS, SANAS, SAPAS, SATAS, SECES, SEDES, SEGES, SENES, SEPES, SERES, SIDIS, SIRIS, SITIS, SIVIS, SOLOS, SONOS, SUCUS, SUDUS, SUMUS, SUTUS, TAXAT, TEGET, TENET, TEPET, TEXET

The first and last words of the square must be a palindromic pair whose middle letters begin with one of the above, yielding this list of 35:⁶

Animo/Omina, Antea/Aetna, Arabo/Obara, Assam/Massa, Assum/Mussa, Aures/Serua, Essem/Messe, Iurem/Merui, Iesum/Musei, Iuras/Sarui, Iures/Serui, Maius/Suiam, Marem/Meram, Mares/Seram, Metor/Rotem, Metum/Mutem, Mites/Setim, Mitis/Sitim, Mures/Serum, Muris/Sirum, Mutas/Satum Mutis/Situm, Mutit/Titum, Mutus/Sutum, Natas/Satan, Nemus/Sumen, Neris/Siren, Orabo/Obaro, Rotas/Sator, Rutas/Satur, Samus/Sumas, Satis/Sitas, Satus/Sutas, Seius/Suies, Simus/Sumis

Of these narrowing options, Alberto G. Peano Casavola notes:⁷

If both the word for the second line and its reverse for the fourth one are required to be meaningful […], there are a few dozens of solutions listed by Gunn.

The program found solutions. Not one—a significant number of formally valid Latin squares can be assembled under those constraints. Additionally, Gunn’s program was able to identify three 5×5 squares composed entirely of palindromes:⁸

Not a single one besides the Sator left any trace in the historical record. None propagated. None was scratched on a wall, copied onto a parchment, carved into a tomb, or folded into a charm.

The most recent burial is Casavola’s. Writing in 2024, he cites both Guarducci and Gunn in his footnotes, only to read past their findings and construct his own 20-page receiver story—the square decoded through Virgilian palingenesis and Saturn’s pruning-knife.⁹ He does exactly what the square invites everyone to do: look into it and see one’s own reflection.

Though somehow missing his own point, of the three fully palindromic squares Gunn offered, Casavola concedes:¹⁰

Although they are much more symmetrical than the Rotas/Sator square, no ancient palindromist ever got excited about any of them and recorded it for us on stone, parchment or papyrus.

Gunn computed 2,264 valid squares if you allow nonsense words¹¹—If you require all five to mean something, the Sator is the only solution.

And before the Sator, there was ROMA.

As I’ve mentioned before, Romans knew their city’s name reversed into amor—love. It is the kind of accident that invites play, and they played with it. Casavola documents at least three ancient attempts at a 4×4 ROMA word square, the earliest from Pompeii: grids built on the ROMA / AMOR axis, the interior cells filled with varying success.¹²

The 4×4 grid is forgiving—looser constraints, wider solution space, the palindromic engine already given by the language. Building these squares was a pastime, not an intellectual feat. Wall-scratching. Graffiti. Doodling with the formal structure of a puzzle.

This establishes the nursery. Someone filling 4×4 grids naturally wonders whether a 5×5 is possible. The step is obvious; the execution exponentially harder. At 5×5, Gunn’s enumeration shows the fourfold symmetry produces a small but real set of valid Latin squares. Most land on vocabulary no one would bother repeating. But one—by an accident of the Latin lexicon—lands on sator and tenet and rotas, and sounds like a statement about God.

The ROMA squares prove Romans were building word squares as a cultural practice. The Sator emerged not from a single mind but from a tradition of play already running on the smaller grid. The step up was natural. The survival of only one result was not. That asymmetry—widespread practice, singular survivor—is the fingerprint of selection, not authorship.

This changes the origin question. For 140 years, since Reinhold Köhler’s 1881 survey,¹³ scholars have asked: who composed the Sator square? Jews? Christians? Stoics? Mithraists? A bored legionary? The answer suggested by Gunn’s data is more unsettling: nobody composed it, because it composes itself.

The analogy is ecological. Many seeds can germinate in the same soil—Gunn showed the constraints permit a significant number of formally valid Latin squares. But most say nothing worth repeating. Selection is not about what can exist; it is about what survives. The Romans who scratched ROMA / AMOR squares on the walls of Pompeii were already working the 4×4 version of the problem. Someone—perhaps many someones, independently—tried a 5×5 grid, and the only meaningful solution propagated. This is why the authorship question produces nothing but receiver stories. There is no author to find. The square is a property of Latin.

Once the square exists, it becomes a mirror. Every community that encounters it sees its own theology reflected back. A Stoic reads it and finds the Logos spermatikos—the divine sower (sator) governing the cosmos with providential care (tenet opera rotas). A Roman poet steeped in Virgil’s fourth eclogue reads the return of Saturn’s golden age, the Saturnia regna, announced by wheels turning back to their origin. A follower of Mithras finds Saturn and his harpe—the pruning knife Casavola identifies with AREPO through three medieval glossaries—presiding over the highest initiation grade.¹⁴ A Jew in first-century Pompeii, if Nicolas Vinel is right, finds messianic prophecy¹⁵ encoded in the same letters that yield PATER NOSTER in a cross with Alpha and Omega at the terminals.¹⁶ A Christian reads the Son of Man with his sickle in Revelation 14, the sator of Matthew 13:37, the cross formed by the two TENETs.

None of these readings is wrong. But none of them are the “solution” either. They are projections—meaning supplied to a form that precedes all of them. Vinel’s Jewish-origin thesis is the most historically specific of the group, grounded in real evidence of Jewish presence in Pompeii, but it answers the question “who might have recognized meaning in this square?” rather than “who put meaning into it”. The distinction matters. What Vinel describes is an early act of reception, not an act of authorship. The square was already there, doing what it does: offering a surface legible as sacred without being legible as specific.

If the square were a message, you could not swap its words out without destroying it. But Coptic evidence shows you can do almost anything to those words, and the square keeps working.¹⁷

On certain witnesses, the square appears as ARETO / OTERA in place of AREPO / OPERA.¹⁸ Two of the five words replaced, two-fifths of the “message” simply gone. And nothing happens. The form persists. The sacred feeling endures. Copyists keep treating it as powerful, keep folding it into amulets, keep carrying it as protection.

Casavola offers a sharper alternative: the substitution may have been deliberate. If AREPO was understood as Saturn’s pruning-knife—his reading, grounded in medieval glossary entries linking aripus to gladius falcatus—then Coptic Christians may have swapped the word precisely because it carried pagan meaning they wanted to shed. The sator could be Christ; the harpe could not.¹⁹

But the Coptic witnesses do not stop at substitution. On a pair of healing amulets, the scribe glosses all five words as “the names of the nails which bound Jesus to the cross”—not corruption, not purge, but wholesale re-semanticization.²⁰ The same letters that may once have described a farmer at his plough now describe the instruments of the Passion. The tradition survives into Ethiopian Orthodoxy, where the five-nails reading persists to this day.

And then there is a small papyrus sheet from the late sixth or early seventh century, folded into an amulet packet against venomous creatures.²¹ The Sator square appears on it alongside the alpha-leôn square—the four living creatures of Revelation—the names of the three Magi, and Psalm 118. No gloss, no interpretation, no indication the scribe understood the Latin at all. The square sits in a Christian assemblage the way a stone sits in a wall: structurally present, semantically inert, doing its work by being there.

Three witnesses, three relationships to the same five words. One community swaps them. One re-reads them as the nails of Christ. One copies them alongside scripture without comment. And in every case the square keeps working—because its potency never lived in any single interpretation. It lived in the form being legible as sacred without being legible as specific. The square travels without its meaning intact, because the meaning was never the cargo.

22 Coptic specimens survive across four centuries and multiple sites—too consistent for scribal error, too widespread for a single line of transmission. In every case, the three load-bearing words hold: SATOR, TENET, ROTAS. Everything else is ornament. The Copts proved it by stripping the ornament away and finding that the sacred feeling survived intact.

The Sator debate has been running since 1881 and it keeps stalling because it keeps asking the wrong question. “Who made it?” presupposes a composer with an intention. But the form generates itself. The right question is: why does this seed take root in so many different soils? The answer is in the vocabulary. By pure combinatorial accident, the only meaningful 5×5 Latin palindrome happens to land on three words that span the concerns of every theology: creation (sator), governance (tenet), and cosmic cycles (rotas). A divine agent who creates, who holds, who turns the wheels—that is the minimum viable god.

Any monotheist or providentialist can read their own version into it because the sentence describes the job specification for a supreme being without naming a candidate. AREPO may have felt too narrow to the Copts—to Saturn, to a billhook, to a specific mythology. So they dropped it. This is why the square outlasted every specific interpretation. The less specific it became, the more universally it could be received.

The Sator square is not a message. It’s a mirror. This is the third case study in a pattern that keeps recurring in this series and beyond it. The Ægishjálmur is not a Viking-age survival but an early-modern syncretic creation—a form that travels the continental sigil-magic pipeline and is received as indigenous. The Sator is not a Jewish cryptogram, or a Christian prayer, or a Stoic maxim—it is a linguistic accident received as all three. In both cases, the form precedes the meaning. In both cases, the search for an original author is a category error.

Whoever first scratched the Rotas square on a column in Pompeii may have thought they were recording a clever solution to a word puzzle. They were. But the puzzle had only one answer, and the answer happened to describe God. Everything that followed—the legionary amulets, the Coptic parchments, the Nubian archbishop’s tomb, the Italian church mosaics, the Icelandic grimoires, the healing charms—is the history of people encountering that accident and mistaking it for a revelation. The square has no author. It has only receivers. And every receiver, including every scholar who has tried to solve it, has looked into the grid and seen exactly what the grid was always going to show them: their own idea of who holds the wheels.

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Read previous articles in the Sator Square series

Part 1: Acrostic as Microcosm

Part 2: Sator Square Non-Starters

Part 3: And the Rotas Go ’Round

Part 4: Blessings Through Sator

Part 5: Loosening “Tenet”’s Hold

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Notes

1. Margherita Guarducci, “Il misterioso ‘quadrato magico’”, Archeologia Classica, 1965.
2. Felix Grosser, “Ein neuer Vorschlag zur Deutung der Sator-Formel” (“A New Proposal for Interpreting the Sator Formula”), Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1926.
3. Paul Veyne, “Le carré Sator ou beaucoup de bruit pour rien” (“The Sator Square, or Much Ado About Nothing”), Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé: Lettres d’humanité, December 1968.
4. Charles Douglas Gunn, The Sator-Arepo Palindrome: An Inquiry into the Composition of an Ancient Word Square, 1969.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Alberto G. Peano Casavola, The Coherent Meaning of the ROTAS/SATOR Squares/Sentences Until Magicians Messed It Up, 2024.
8. Gunn, 1969.
9. Casavola, 2024.
10. Ibid.
11. Gunn, 1969.
12. Casavola, 2024.
13. Reinhold Köhler, “Sator-arepo-formel”, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1881.
14. Casavola, 2024.
15. [Nicolas Vinel, “The Hidden Judaism of the Sator Square in Pompeii”, Revue de l’histoire des religions, April 2006.]
16. Grosser, 1926.
17. P. 982: Sator-Amulett, seventh century, Berliner Papyrusdatenbank.
18. KYP M450, 530–570, KYP M226 976–1025, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
19. Casavola, 2024.
20. P. Heid. Inv. 685, 951–1000, Heidelberg Library.
21. P.CyYBR inv. 1792, sixth–seventh century CE, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Papyrus Collection.

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.

Surrealist threads in “La Belle et la Bête” (DeDisneyfication, Part 4 Addendum)

I wrote about Disney’s Beauty and the Beast some time back, and hadn’t planned to revisit it. However, I’ve recently been reading Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers. The book discusses the originators of various well-known fairy tales, including Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Within this section on the author of “La Belle et la Bête” (the tale’s original name, “B&B” hereafter), Jubber claims the work contains “surreal elements”.¹

I’m not bothered by the apparent anachronism of applying a word coined in 1917 to describe a status quo-challenging movement to a fairy tale written in 1740. However, the term is too often over- or misused. In the fairy tale genre of folklore, you can expect to encounter magic, enchantments, and whimsical creatures. And in general use, surreal means dreamlike or fantastical, so there’s clear overlap there.

Some elements of “B&B” definitely belong in the realm of folktale and myth. When the father arrives at the Château de la Bête, food is laid out and invisible servants attend him. This is not surreal, but commonplace in these tales. We see it repeatedly in Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales.² Likewise, the super-swift horse conveying the father home and returning Belle to the castle. The transgression provoking the Beast’s wrath is picking a rose, which we see many corollaries to in myth: drinking from a sacred well, slaying an animal (often a deer), or even eating literal forbidden fruit.

Meanwhile, in the realm of art and culture, the surreal is more specifically defined. While there is an idea of giving expression to the unconscious, surprising juxtapositions are central to the movement. As André Breton, one of its leaders, stated in his manifesto:³

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.

The illogic and non sequitur of surrealism are indeed what Jubber is referring to. He says:⁴

[S]urreal elements in Gabrielle-Suzanne’s fiction reflect a class in trouble, squeezed between monarchical absolutism and the rise of the merchant class. The Beast, courting Belle with magical gifts but locked in the castle by a curse, echoes the real-world aristocracy, stupefying itself with flamboyant delights while real power trickled away.

And many elements of “B&B” go further than the usual wonderments of fairyland. While we expect enchanted objects and magical occurrences, de Villeneuve takes it to a different level with passages like:⁵

[T]he monkey Captain of the Guard, by the beak of his parrot Interpreter, announced the visit of some ladies.

Where earlier works in the Animal as Bridegroom motif feature mere animals, particularly bears, as in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”,⁶ “B&B” has the actual Beast. In the urban environs of Enlightenment Paris (1715–1801), the terror of natural creatures had waned. Royal menageries were already well known and the city’s first zoo was only a few decades off.

Instead, de Villeneuve conjures her thoroughly chimerical Bête with his elephant’s trunk, enormous weight, and clanking scales, and who roars and howls.⁷ She gives these details, but few others, and with no attempt made to reconcile them into a whole. This allows the reader’s imagination to do the work—an excellent use of the Umberto Eco-esque open work.

Neither does she include the usual fairytale journey from poverty to riches, from rural to urban. Rather, Belle’s father is a merchant—a member of the bourgeoisie from “a great city wherein trade flourishes abundantly”.⁸ The family descends into poverty because of his speculation. He has invested in shipping, but rather than returning with goods to sell for a profit, the ships run afoul of storms and sink.

This seems an obvious reflection of actual issues de Villeneuve had to face. Widowed at 26, she found her husband had gambled away his wealth. Leaving her to:⁹

[…] parcel out the estate piece by piece, her property slipping away in “a succession of sales, attempts at recovery, contracts of retrocession, debtors’ seizures or standing requests”.

De Villeneuve drew on her knowledge of the noble classes she once belonged to for her tale. It’s clear Château de la Bête is really Versailles, with a hall of mirrors and a vast garden at which Belle’s “eyes were enchanted; they had never seen anything in nature so beautiful”, including:¹⁰

[…] groves […] ornamented with admirable statues and numberless fountains […].

Further, she:¹¹

[P]ortrays the Beast as the victim of an ancient and malignant fairy who cursed him when the handsome youth turned down her amorous advances. The story encrypts the corrupt and vicious intrigues of court life, of fortune-hunting and marriage-braking [sic], pandering and lust in the ancién regime […].

And in this regard, the surrealism borders on satire, for example, with the “monkeys”:¹²

[T]wo tall young apes, in court dresses […] advanced and placed themselves with great gravity beside her. Two sprightly little monkeys took up her train as her pages. A facetious baboon, dressed as a Spanish gentleman of the chamber, presented his paw to her, very neatly gloved […].

When it comes to the surreal and “B&B”, it’s obvious to point to the 1946 film of Jean Cocteau, a notable surrealist. Interestingly, however, he took an entirely different tack. We can assume he has full knowledge of the tenets of the movement, but he flips the script—going for a stylized realism and a realistic fantasy:¹³

To realism, I would oppose the simplified, formalized behavior of characters out of Molière […]. To fairyland as people usually see it, I would bring a kind of realism to banish the vague and misty nonsense now so completely outworn.

The juxtaposition of elements remains, of course, but becomes still more surprising. 

The biggest change from de Villeneuve’s version of “B&B” to Disney’s and other modern ones is the portrayal of the Beast.

De Villeneuve’s Belle never falls in love with la Bête. Rather, she directs her affections toward a man termed “the Unknown”, who appears in her dreams. She describes him as, “a young man, beautiful as Cupid is painted”.¹⁴ portrayed as perfect in all other ways as well. Belle’s final crisis is choosing between the Unknown and la Bête, and when she accepts the monster, he becomes the prince. Similarly, Disney intended their Beast to be hideous and their Prince to be beautiful. But the tubeosphere has widely expressed disappointment with their Prince Charming.

So what happened between de Villeneuve and Disney? Cocteau. He had this effect clearly in mind:¹⁵

My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to other men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty.

The other strategy he used to accomplish this was to twist his portrayal of the Prince:¹⁶

Slyly, and with much effort, I persuaded my cameraman [Henri] Alekan to shoot Jean Marais, as the Prince in as saccharine a style as possible.

And indeed, la Bête’s final transformation is parasitic—rather than returning to his true form, he steals the appearance of Belle’s human suitor, Avenant.

De Villeneuve innovated the animal bridegroom to instill new horror. She even employed the other meaning of bête, presenting him as stupid. Cocteau, on the other hand, wanted to subvert the standards of beauty he felt remained too narrow and conventional in his time, still hearkening back to these fairy tales. In the press book for the premiere of La Belle et la Bête in Los Angeles, he’s raw about how the film was received in France:¹⁷

There has never yet been an instance of something new not baffling the esthetes, the critics and the public, lazily accepting familiar formulas. The least challenge is apt to awaken a brutal and unpleasant response.

It seems this was just a slow burn. Just as Futurists like Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti expanded our notions of beauty to include the machine, Cocteau did so for the beast. As he relates poet Paul Eluard said:¹⁸

[T]o understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

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Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

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

Part 12: Mork & Scheherazade

---

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

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Notes

1. Nicholas Jubber, The Fairy Tellers: A Journey Into the Secret History of Fairy Tales, 2022.
2. Italo Calvino, Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales), 1956.
3. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 1924.
4. Jubber, 2022.
5. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, “La Belle et La Bête”, 1740, translated in “The Story of Beauty and the Beast”, Four and Twenty Fairy Tales Selected from Those of Perrault, and Other Popular Writers, J. R Planché (trans.), 1858.
6. Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North, 1914.
7. De Villeneuve, 1740.
8. Ibid.
9. Jubber, 2022.
10. De Villeneuve, 1740.
11. Marina Warner, “On beauties and their beasts”, Sight and Sound, 2021.
12. De Villeneuve, 1740. She uses the collective monkeys to include apes as well.
13. Jean Cocteau, “Once Upon a Time—French Poet Explains His Filming of Fairy Tale”, from the original press book for the U.S. premiere of La Belle et la Bête, 1946.
14. De Villeneuve, 1740.
15. Cocteau, 1946.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.