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readallthenewberys2012-10-04 07:58 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-10-04 07:58 pm
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Newbery Honor: The Voyagers, Being Legends & Histories of Atlantic Discovery (Padraic Colum)
Yay, more Padraic Colum! :D I hope this is good. Obviously the concept - "Atlantic discovery" - is a bit inherently racist in that America had been discovered a lot of times before white people did it across the Atlantic. But... I'm hoping it'll be good apart from that? :S
* Ooh, the frontispiece is STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS. I like this illustrator. Wilfred Jones? I like him.
* Awww. Padraic Colum does what he does, and he does it well. The setup of this book is, that Prince Henry the Navigator is giving a great feast in his tower upon the shores of Portugal, and has invited many learned men who know rumors and tales of the lands to the west. Each learned man in turn will tell his tale, in a chapter or in chapters. The first to speek is a Greek man who will tell about Atlantis.
* And the writing is FLAMING GLORIOUS. As usual. *glee and delight* It is such wonderful writing. I could roll around in it, or wear it as a comfy cloak. It is dark blue velvet writing with stars in it. :D *hearts*
* [almost three weeks later] Okay, RL kind of ate me there. Okay, that and embarrassment over the above sentence. ;-) I keep trying to be a Dignified Professional-ish Reviewer sort of person when really I am a small turtle-kitten looking for new good word-blankets to snuggle in. ^_^
(Is a turtle-kitten a thing? Never mind. ;P)
* Our educated Greek gentleman tells how Poseidon fell in love with and peremptorily married (*koff* this is a kids' book) a lady named Cleito, who lived on the island not-yet-called Atlantis. The lady's reaction is not given. o_O Poseidon broke the land surrounding the hill on which she lived into concentric rings of land and water - a description which reminds me oddly (though this may just be me) of reading about Tenochtitlan, the Aztec-era forerunner of modern Mexico City. Tenochtitlan was a city on an island, with causeways running to the mainland at the cardinal points.
* Poseidon also makes the land fertile, causes hot and cold running spring-water to rise on the central island (wasn't that also a feature of Mount Ida near ancient Troy? I can't find confirmation on Wiki), and when the lady bears him ten children, makes the eldest the king of the central domain - including Cleito's dwelling, because apparently we are not going to be as sensitive about the ladies this time around as we were in Golden Fleece - and High King over the rest, and splits up the rest of the land among the other nine kids.
* The kingdom of Atlantis is named after the oldest boy, Atlas - not, I assume, the same Atlas who shrugged... ah, here we are. There are three Atlases! A king of Mauretania who made the first celestial globe, and after whom Mercator named his map-book; the Titan Atlas, who carried the heavens as a punishment for (if I recall correctly) going all Tower of Babel on Mount Olympus; and this Atlas, the first king of Atlantis, who gives his name to the island and to the Atlantic Ocean by extension.
* Okay. And the kingdom lasts for a lot of generations, and they have all sorts of awesome animal, vegetable, and mineral wealth; I am especially amused by "there were animals wild and tame, amongst them elephants in great numbers." Okay then! :D A notable metal found in Atlantis and no longer used as of Plato's time is orichalcum; Wiki cites Josephus as stating that the vessels in the Temple of Solomon were made out of orichalcum, and Pliny the Elder as confirming that it was no longer used. Pliny apparently says the orichalcum mines were exhausted, but the rest of the Wiki article assumes it's some sort of alloy. *interested geology student is interested*
* Ooh, cool. Comparing this description of Atlantis at the height of its glory to Wiki's article, I'm guessing Mr Colum is translating the Critias pretty closely - they both use the identical phrase "[it] flashed with the red light of orichalcum" about the innermost wall of the Atlantean citadel.
* I am not impressed by your use of the specific phrase "a sort of barbaric splendor" about a temple entirely covered with gold, silver, and orichalcum, Mr Colum. "Splendor" alone would have been quite sufficient and more polite.
* You see why I've been so concerned to add some books I knew were good to this list. The authors the Newbery committee picked out aren't dependable. o_O Unless that is another bit of accurate translation of the Critias, which I haven't read; I wouldn't put it past Plato, at all. (Oh you snotty Ancient Greeks. ;P)
* Anyway, he gets to the point where Zeus is gathering the other gods together to tell them that Atlantis is getting all dissolute and something needs to be done, and then he stops, as Plato does, and gives a quick summary - still in the voice of this Greek ambassador dude who is speaking to Prince Henry and his assembled guests - of how Atlantis might have been destroyed in floods or earthquakes; of how there are conflicting traditions (including reference to an Arab tradition, neat); and of how all they really know is that there isn't any Atlantis out there anymore, but maybe some of the other minor islands the Atlanteans ruled over are still there. He also throws in a tradition - I don't know if it's from the original writings of Plato on the topic - that the Atlanteans ruled over part of another continent opposite Europe (which we're meant to know is America), "that touches upon the real Ocean".
* Now there's a brief interlude at Prince Henry's feast, where people bring up the legend of the Antilles, and also mention the Arabic sailors who used the port of Lisbon - which is nice, even if it's only in the context of "telling of a Sea of Darkness". Most writers tend to ignore the Islamic rulers of southern Spain altogether, as a sort of Relative Whiteness Contrast: the most important people in a given landmass are the whitest ones, so that the Spanish are sympathetic as long as they're fighting Moors or Native Central Americans, but become rapidly unsympathetic when they start fighting (in Europe) English or Dutch or (in the not-yet-U.S.) whoever they fought in Florida. English again? Sorry, my knowledge of the history of San Agustin has dwindled about to the point where the only thing I remember is the remarkable anti-cannonball property of coquina rock. ;-) And I'm really tired of googling history, after my adventures with The Story of White People: How It Should Have Happened According to Hendrik Willem van Loon. (How is that object still in print? /digression)
* Mmmkay, now we have an Irishman, who will tell us the story of Maelduin. I don't know Maelduin, at all.
* Maelduin is a boy who was adopted by the king and queen, and didn't know his own parents until somebody taunted him with being adopted, on which he went home and demanded of his mother the queen whether that was true. She says "I am thy mother, for none ever loved her son more than I love thee", but he keeps pleading until she takes him home to meet his birth mother. (His birth father is dead.) And Maelduin's three foster-brothers, the sons of the king and queen, go with him, and they all stay in the Isle of Arran.
* Then later on, while he's playing at sports in a ruined church because of reasons, an old monk tells him it would be better for him to go and avenge his birth-father, on whose grave he's playing, than to be... well, playing on his father's grave! So Maelduin goes to a wizard, and gets instructions for building a boat and going to find the hideout of the "reivers" who killed his dad, and is very firmly instructed that no more than seventeen companions shall go with him in the boat.
* So of course when he's taking off, his three foster-brothers - whom he didn't ask to accompany him, again because of reasons? - swim after him and he is obliged to take them into the boat so they won't drown from being too far away from land to swim back.
* So they get to an island with a fortress on it, and they hear a guy bragging about how he killed Maelduin's birth-father, Ailill of Arran, and nobody has ever come after him for vengeance, so he is better than the other robbers, neener neener. :D (Padraic Colum did not say neener neener.) But before Maelduin can get out of the boat and kill the dude, a great wind comes up and blows them away, and Maelduin fusses at his foster-brothers for coming along in the boat and breaking his chances. Because Maelduin is Genre-Savvy and knows how to behave in a fairy tale, he does. ;-)
* Then they go and see many, many islands. And on one island there is food, and jewelry hanging on the walls, and also a little cat jumping from pillar to pillar; and Maelduin asks the cat if they may eat the food, and it's okay with that, but Maelduin's youngest foster-brother takes down a torque from the wall and the little cat jumps right through him "like a fiery arrow" and he falls down in ashes on the floor! O_O So Maelduin puts the torque back on the wall and gets the cat to calm down, and they strew the boy's ashes on the shore and go away again.
* They come to another island, with a complicated bridge of glass that isn't quite making sense to me, and they meet a lady who gives them all food and drink, and they want to stay there, so they ask her if she'll marry Maelduin and let them all live on the island with her. And she says they'll have an answer tomorrow, and when they wake up tomorrow they're on a different island altogether, as far as they can tell. With their boat. It's sort of like a combination of the Lotos-Eaters (with the "why should we ever labor up the laboring wave?" type of attitude) and the Grail Castle that goes and disappears in Lohengrin. And I am now far beyond my depth, because I only know of all these things second-hand. *g*
* Then there are a lot more strange islands, and Maelduin's other two foster-brothers are lost, one on an island of people who weep and mourn and will not be comforted, and the other on an island of people who laugh and play and will pay no attention to their friends yelling from the boat. Because Maelduin's foster-brothers are DOPES, but I guess we knew that ever since they swam after him, really. ;P
* And then they find the island of the Fountain of Youth, and see an eagle bathe in it - which is correlated to a verse in the Psalms, "Thy youth is renewed as the eagle's", which, what - but only one of the mariners dares to bathe in it too, because the rest of them are afraid that it won't work for them or that the eagle has left poison in the water, or something. He apparently does die eventually, because Padraic Colum says that "for as long as he lived" he was hale and hearty and so forth.
* On googling this particular mariner, Diuran the Rhymer (scroll down), I find that if he's well known it's not under that name, but that he's going to recur later in the story and that he's apparently quite bold but manages not to get killed by the Laws of Fairy-Tales. *g*
* And now they come to a land of all women, and marry them (Maelduin marries the queen; I am oddly reminded of one of the stories in Golden Fleece), and plan to stay there forever, but after a while they get antsy and want to leave, even though the queen assures them they'll have eternal youth as long as they stay there. After a while, all of them but Maelduin want to leave, so they haul him off while the queen's away ona business trip queening business of some sort - but she comes galloping up just as they're leaving and chucks a ball of string at them, and Maelduin catches it and it sticks to his hand, so she can reel them back to land. This happens twice. The third time it happens, some other dude - not Maelduin - catches it, and so Diuran the Rhymer goes and chops off the guy's hand! "And thus they made their escape from the Island of the Women." O_O Wow.
* Then on sailing along, they come to a place where the sea is really transparent, and then where it's strange and misty; and down on the seafloor they see a lot of people and cows and things. And some of the people see them and chuck nuts at them(!) and are very angry and worried about their boat sailing along up in the sky. And Diuran, because apparently he gets mentioned a lot now, remarks that probably those people had a prophecy that somebody would come and take their country from them, and figured Maelduin's dudes were the ones prophecied. Diuran does not explain why he thinks this, or whether the prophecy would specify sailing in the sky or anything. ;-) Yeah, I'm getting a little nitpicky. It's not quite as good a book as Golden Fleece, I don't think!
* Um. That's interesting. Then they come to a tall silver column in the sea, with a giant silver net draped off it, and their boat sails right through one of the meshes of the net. But Diuran the Rhymer chops off a piece of the silver net; Maelduin says "don't destroy it, for it is the work of mighty men", but Diuran says "if we make it home, I'm going to offer this on the high altar of Armagh so that everybody will believe our story". Which might signify that Diuran is even more Genre Savvy than Maelduin, or possibly just has more nerve - you'd expect him to start getting killed, stabbing the fourth wall so much - but personally... I'm just starting to suspect he really likes chopping things. ;-)
* Now they meet a hermit who tells Maelduin he will get home, and not to kill the guy who killed his father, because God has spared Maelduin's own life for so long in all these really weird adventures. So then they start sailing toward home, and seeing familiar birds and stuff, and they come to the island with the fortress of the robbers again. There they overhear the robber who killed Maelduin's dad saying that if Maelduin showed up they'd welcome him and be friendly at him, because of all his REALLY WEIRD ADVENTURES and tribulations and stuff... and so Maelduin knocks on the door, and Team Robbers and Team Adventur sit down together for a nice meal. :D Then Team Adventur all go home and tell their story, and everyone is happy. The end.
* Well, not the end of the book. The end of the story of Maelduin.
* Next up is the story of St Brendan. The Irish seem to have a lot of stories about sailing around on the Big Puddle encountering Really Weird Adventures. ;-)
* I seem to enjoy Padraic Colum's style more when I already know the story more or less, as with Golden Fleece and as with the story of St Brendan here. It's very pretty.
* I really, really wish ALL THE BOOKS were online, so that I could show you guys the first illustration of St Brendan And The Whale that ever I saw. It was a really cute illustration, in an old 1950s school reader, of the whale waking up rather startled to have the Easter fire kindled on its back, and all the monks kind of flying off his back a bit helter-skelter. ...it was a very cute whale. If I had it handy I would scan it, but I think my mum lent it to somebody. :P
* Anyway, according to this story - which I think is a bit closer to the actual Lay of St Brendan than the retelling I had with the illustration was - Brendan celebrated Easter Mass on the whale's back five different years. Because of reasons. O_O
* ...okay, that's the funniest thing. I googled Fastitocalon, because that's the name of the poem JRR Tolkien wrote which tells a similar story about landing on the back of a giant sea-monster... but WELL DID YOU EVER. Apparently in everything but the story of St Brendan, the whale-that-looks-like-land (or turtle-that-looks-like-land; the name "Fastitocalon" is anglicized from "Aspidochelone", "asp-turtle" or "shield-turtle") is a symbol of The Deceitfulness Of The Devil and the moral is "don't land on something that only looks like land, it will drown you in the deep ocean!" Instead of "if you are a good person and exploring for the glory of God, God will send you a random sea-monster that looks like land so you can celebrate Easter Mass like God wants you to".
There has got to be a paper's worth of compare-and-contrast there, about the different attitudes that produce these two stories, but I can't quite come up with it right now. Huh.
* On re-checking the provenance of "Aspidochelone" - I only noticed the "asp" variant before, not the "shield" variant - part of me now really, really wants to come up with a time-travelling crackfic in which the SHIELD helicarrier is involved in originating the legends of Fastitocalon. :D This is probably the same part of my brain that was shaped by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with the Nautilus being mistaken for a Moby-Dick-type aggressive sea-creature, when I was eight. :D
* They see more sights, and on an island they meet a very old shrivelled-up hermit who tells them they can't get to "the Radiant Land" (this is apparently the name Padraic Colum is using for Hy-Brasil / the Island of the Blessed) in their skin boats, but they have to go back home and get a wooden boat made for them to go voyaging in. So Brendan goes home, and missionizes to the Orkneys for a while, and then eventually has a wooden boat built and goes on back out to sail West again.
* Further down in the same Wiki article about Brendan's whale, its name is given as "Jasconius". Padraic Colum also names a "monster of the deep" as Jasconius; both sources note that this large fish is always trying to put its tail in its mouth but cannot because its body is too long. *mutters about whitings and the Lobster Quadrille* I mention this specially because I'm SURE I've heard the name Jasconius somewhere before; I did once try to write a paper on St Brendan (it was a very bad paper), so it might have been in one of my sources for that. O_O
* They also have an island to celebrate Easter on, in the very next paragraph, that is not Jasconius the Whale, and now I am thoroughly confused.
* Now here is a story of three hermits, before Brendan's time, who went and lived on a small island with three small cakes and a cat. (The Irish appear to like cats a lot in this book.) And they ate nuts and berries, and the cat brought them a fine fat salmon every day to eat. And they were like "oh, we shouldn't eat this, it is not Penitential enough living here if we have salmon to eat!" but an angel came and told them EAT THE SALMON, GOD SENT IT. So they did, and they sang sang hymns and things daily in thanksgiving for the salmon and their hermitage. And one of them died, and then another one died, and each time the remaining one/s buried them and did their hymns of thanksgiving as well as his own. But then the angel comes to the last hermit again and says "Why are you grumbling?" and the hermit says "Why did the other two get to die and go to Heaven, and I didn't yet?" And the angel says "because you offered the longest hymns, God has given you the longest life, but also you will get to go to Heaven afterwards." So the hermit is like "oh, okay".
And then Brendan and his monks come to the island of the three hermits and the cat (you must NOT forget the cat, Best Beloved *g* - although the cat jumps into the sea as soon as Brendan and his men come to the island, and is not seen anymore O_O), and the last hermit is very old and going to die. So Brendan gives him the Last Sacraments, and after he dies, buries him with a proper requiem and all. And then they sail away from the Island of the Cat.
* And after that, it is a great calm and Brendan et al drift they know not whither, for twenty days. And then after the wind picks up again, there is a GIANT FISH that snorts foam from its nostrils, and it is about to eat their boat - very Moby Dick, again - but another monster THAT BREATHES FIRE comes up from the deep when Brendan prays, and does battle with the foam-snorting fish! And the flame-breathing monster wins, and then goes placidly back into the deep again.
* It is really, really interesting to me, especially in conjunction with the whale-turtle-helicarrier thing from earlier, that the FIRE-BREATHING MONSTER is the "good" one in this exchange! Brendan's Lay seems to be turning all sorts of conventional imagery on its head. :D I rather like it.
* Now Brendan - like Maelduin - comes to a very clear ocean, full of sea-monsters (and here's our friend Jasconius again), and his men are worried that the monsters will come up and eat them. But Brendan fusses at them for being worrywarts, and sings Mass very loudly, and the fishes and sea-monsters come up to hear Mass, and when it is finished they all go swim away. :-) Then Brendan et al meet a very geometrical... iceberg with square columns?... and measure it. Geometrically. And then they go and sail away somewhere else.
* And then... ooh, this is interesting! They find an iceberg further north (this one is just identified as an iceberg, but I'd like to know what else the geometrical building of very cold crystal might have been) with a man sitting on it, on Christmas Day, and the man tells them he is Judas Iscariot, who for one day a year on Christmas is allowed to leave hell and cool off from the flames, because he once gave his cloak to a leper. And he gets to sit on a stone instead of on the bare ice, because he once filled a pothole with that stone, for the comfort of travellers.
I like that story.
* They find in the far north an island full of smoky forges and blacksmiths who chuck masses of molten iron at them. The part of me that is trying to identify what places I can says "Iceland". Ya think?
* Then they go south and find an island full of fruit and fresh water and pretty trees and birds, and one of the birds tells Brendan that all these birds used to be angels, but when the devils went bad and were cast out of heaven, these angels were... neither faithful nor unfaithful to God. So they couldn't stay in heaven, but also they were not cast into Hell... so they have to stay on Earth. - you know, I keep hearing this story in Irish contexts. Sometimes it's the fairies, sometimes it's Jack O'Lantern (well, he's more usually a human soul who was not good enough to go to heaven but played tricks on the Devil till he wouldn't be let into hell), but this is the first time I've known it to be birds. Interesting.
* Then they come to an island of silent hermits who give them written directions to the Radiant Land / Land of the Blessed / Hy-Brasil. And they sail to Hy-Brasil, and explore it but find no people. And then they come to a wide river they cannot cross, and an angel tells them this is all the further they can go, but other men will come and cross the river sometime. (I'm preeeeetty sure that last bit, about the other men crossing it, comes from a post-Columbian perspective identifying this river as the Mississippi.) So Brendan and his men sail back away to Ireland and tell their tale.
* With retellings I seem to note more the things that I didn't know yet than the things I did know. And now we come to the story of "The Children of Eric the Red" (which is a better name for it than just "Leif the Lucky", because the second expedition that tried to settle in Vinland didn't have Leif as a member but did have his sister and his brother-in-law). Which I'm pretty much just reading and enjoying it, because it's well-told and goes into plenty of detail, about old Eric and about Bjarni who first saw the shores of Vinland but did not land, and about King Olaf who wanted to spread Christianity to Greenland.
* Heehee, and here is old man Tyrker the German, who discovers the wine-grapes that give Vinland its name. :D I am enjoying this book.
* Ahaha, I did not know ALL the children of Erik the Red went to Vinland. There are four of them - Leif, Thorvald, Thorstein, and Freydis (the only girl). First Leif went and explored, and came back with grapes and wood, and settled down and was rich and respected. Then Thorvald went, and he was the first to encounter the Skraelings / First Nations people, and... hm, Padraic Colum claims he "captured" eight of the nine sleeping men he chanced upon while the ninth escaped, but I was reasonably sure he killed them. I'll have to hunt down a really good translation of these two sagas and double-check. (The annoying part about translating sagas is that everybody does it, and most of them are more concerned with the sound than the sense. :P)
* Then the third boy, Thorstein, with his new wife Gudrid, tried to sail to Vinland but got lost, and eventually wound up back on the east coast of Greenland (the opposite one from where he started), where he fell ill and died. Gudrid returned to the Erikson family farm, Brattahlid.
* Eventually Gudrid remarries, and talks her new husband Thorfinn Karlsefne - Thorfinn "the Dudely", I'm not kidding - into making a great big settlement in Vinland. It's thought that this one may be L'Anse aux Meadows. (Irrelevantly, I am vastly amused to learn that the original name translates as "Cove of the Medea", that more recently it was "Cove of Medusas" or "Jellyfish Cove", and only in the last hundred years has the Anglicized "Cove of Meadows" become The Right Name.)
* Anyway. OFF TO VINLAND. AGAIN.
* So Thorfinn and Gudrid, and about 160 other people including Freydis and her husband, and a huntsman named Thorhall, all go to Vinland and start making a settlement.
* The story of Thorhall here is reminding me that this particular saga is of a bit later date, and kind of slanted (more than the other Vinland saga) toward HEY LOOK, all us descendants of Erik the Red are so cool, also you should be a Christian! ;-) Because Thorhall the Huntsman is a worshipper of the old gods, especially of Thor, and after a while the settlers run out of food and Thorfinn is like "hey, you're the huntsman, hunt us something!" And Thorhall goes off, but when they find him after a while he hasn't hunted any food, he's just lying on a hilltop muttering. And they ask him "what are you muttering about" and he's all "oh nothing, HEY LOOK A WHALE". So - in Padraic Colum's version they hunt and kill the whale; I'm pretty sure in the other retelling I remember this story from, it was a beached whale. Anyway, and then Thorhall starts bragging, "see, Thor is a totally awesome god for a hunter, I made him a song and he sent us a whale!" And in this version, the people just... won't eat the whale anymore; I'm pretty sure, in the other version I read, they all got sick from the whale meat and were like YEAH RIGHT THOR IS AWESOME, NOT SO MUCH.
* Anyway, and then Thorhall takes a few men and tries to sail back to Greenland, and winds up getting shipwrecked in Ireland (because apparently Vikings are always getting lost in the North Atlantic, Greenland and vinland were both discovered by guys who got blown off course in a storm and then thought it was a great idea to start bragging around about "hey, I saw this new land out west, but I totally didn't land there!"), and Thorhall and all of his men are put in slavery in Ireland, and Thorhall dies there. And that is the end of his story. ;P
* (Another thing that's really striking me here is how... obvious it is that the pagan Norse didn't worship their whole pantheon equally, but kind of specialized in one god/dess or another. Like you'd have a whole group of people naming their kids various forms of "Protection of Thor", which is why I have FOUR DIFFERENT CHARACTERS whose names start with "Thor" in this chapter! O_O)
* And here is the bit of the story that gets retold the most: how Thorfinn's settlement traded peaceably with the Skraelinger / First Nations people, until a bull belonging to the settlement got angry and spooked the natives; and how the natives ran away, and then came back to wage war; and how the natives scared the Vikings with a giant noisemaking ball that they threw into their midst, and all the Vikings ran away; and how Freydis, the daughter of Erik the Red, picked up a sword one of the men dropped, and took off her shirt and pretended to sharpen the sword on her bare breast - at which the native people again ran away, because SCARY INVULNERABLE LADY GONNA KILL US ALL. :D (Padraic Colum walks a fine line here... he states that Freydis "stripped off her clothes, and she struck the naked part of her body with the flat of the sword." Which isn't quite as convincingly scary as explicitly "sharpening the sword on her skin", but has the slight advantage of very carefully ignoring HELLO SHIRTLESS LADY HERE. XD)
* ...okay, this doesn't exactly line up with the "G-rated" part of the comm description, but I'm just going to link this here because it seems apropos: Topless Victorian Ladies' Fight Club (Not Safe For Work), which is an article - with pictures, BECAUSE OF REASONS - about two women in 1892 who fought a topless duel over flower arrangements. Because people often died of minor wounds sustained in a duel, from having bits of not-so-clean fabric from their clothes stuck in the wound - so it was more hygienic to get stabbed while nekkid. But the relevant part here is, you know... topless ladies with swords. *facepalm* Why am I even pretending this comm is kid-appropriate.
* (Why am I even pretending some of these Newberys are kid-appropriate, might be a better question. ;P)
* Anyway! They go away from that place and make a different settlement, and Snorri is born to Gudrid and Thorfinn - the first white child born on North American soil. Which shouldn't be a big deal. o_O We don't know the name of the first brown child born... anywhere, do we, unless it's Cain the son of Adam and Eve? (Not that we know what color they were, assuming they existed. But given that humanity started in either Mesopotamia - if you go by Bible tradition - or the middle of Africa according to the genetics of evolution, prooooobably not pasty white.)
* And then eventually Thorfinn and Gudrid and Snorri go back home to Greenland, and after Thorfinn dies Gudrid winds up as an abbess in a convent and has her story written down, but the colony stays until either the Black Death or the Little Ice Age or a combination thereof, come and wipe it out.
* Now Prince Henry's feast has gone on all night, with the learned men discussing the stories they have heard. And as the sun rises, someone quotes in Latin the verse of Seneca, which is seen as a prophecy (Colum gives both the Latin and a translation): "In the last days there will come an age in which Ocean shall loosen the bonds of things; a great country will be discovered; another Tiphis shall make known new worlds, and Thule shall no longer be the extremity of the earth."
* And now the other half of the book will be devoted to Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, apparently? I don't know. A young Florentine, a student of Marco Polo's writings, is talking with... Columbus's future father-in-law here? O_O
* Mmkay, and this section about Columbus will be a retelling of what "Las Casas the elder" wrote to his son, based on the (now lost) full-length logbook of Columbus's first famous voyage in 1492, as well as on Mr las Casas's own experiences on voyage #2. (I am not entirely sure what goes on with these people named Las Casas, nor whether they relate to the priest Bartolomé de Las Casas who was an advocate for the Native Americans in Mexico and the Caribbean after Cortez.)
* I'm going to blitz over this half of the book a lot quicker unless it is really good, because I just don't expect any account of Columbus from the 1920s to be terribly balanced. o_O
* Ah. Our Florentine dude from last chapter was Toscanelli, the fellow whose messed-up math convinced Columbus that sailing westward to China was possible. (People who got their math right, and therefore realized that you'd essentially have to sail across the Atlantic PLUS the width of America PLUS the Pacific, knew very well that you couldn't carry enough food for that trip in the boats they had, and a bigger boat would need more men to crew it, therefore more food. Also, bigger boats tend to break up in the waves; a wooden boat, unless it is VERY strong and deep, has to be short enough to fit lengthwise between the waves in a storm so it doesn't get picked up by two at a time, and sag and break.)
(Sorry. Any time boats are involved, you are going to get a treatise from me. *g*)
* Giving the Pinzon boys credit for captaining the other two ships, and Martin Pinzon for supplying the Pinta; I approve. Columbus squabbled with them afterwards, so they tend not to get so much credit, but they were good mariners, as Padraic Colum notes.
* He's making a lot of the grumbly crew on Columbus's first expedition. Grumble grumble grumble. This crew is scared of everything! *eyeroll* And Columbus is all full of faith that there is land ahead, and if they do not discover it someone else will! And he is Encouraging his Unruly Crew! ...you know, if there hadn't been America in the way, it's very likely they would all have died of starvation and thirst, because I do not believe for a minute that Columbus would have actually turned around at the end of the three-more-days he said. He was that stubborn. And then they would have been the first people (known of to Europeans, anyway) to disappear in the Bermuda Triangle, which would be an interesting variant on the reasons for their fame. ^_^
* Anyway, they find land. He does give the Native name for the island (as far as we know it), Guanahani, as well as Columbus's Spanish name San Salvador.
* And then there is a section that just makes me eyeroll utterly, where Columbus is all "this place is so gorgeous! BUT WHERE IS THE GOLD, if I do not bring any gold and pearls back to Spain I will have FAAAAAAAAILED, I must find Gold!" and Martin Pinzon runs off on his own to look for gold too, hoping to be Better Than Columbus (which as any schoolchild knows you Do Not Do /extreme sarcasm).
* Exploring the islands; native people, pretty stuff, GOLD GOLD GOLD. Timber for building!
* We encounter King Guacanagari, the first of the native rulers to send Columbus gold. For a 1920s writer, Mr Colum really is being awfully even-handed toward the native peoples - trying to include their own names for things, and so forth. There are awkward lines like "No Christian could have been more considerate than [Guacanagari] was" (after the wreck of the Santa Maria on Christmas Day), but he is trying harder than anyone else I've seen from this decade.
* On the other hand, he keeps playing up how friendly the relations were between Columbus's Spaniards and the natives, and when he mentions that Columbus brought half a dozen "Indians" back with him to Spain... I'm not finding any reference to where or HOW those "Indians" were brought on board. Ahem. :P
* Now here is a chapter about Ponce de Leon and his search for the Fountain of Youth - done in Padraic Colum's best fairy-tale style, so I'm not going to nitpick the details too much (not that I'm massively familiar with the details of Ponce de Leon's story). But he searches and searches, and he loses all his men or they marry and leave the search, and at last an old woman - called simply La Vieja "The Old Woman" - shows him to the Fountain of Youth. But just as he is about to drink, he is shot with an arrow by a hiding native, and he dies. But it's a very pretty chapter, if lacking in history. (It is well that Mr Colum subtitled his book "Being Legends and Histories of Atlantic Discovery"; I'd be much more critical otherwise. *g*)
* Here we have historical or semi-historical accounts of the early English explorations of Virginia, and of Powhatan, and of how Pocahontas was taken prisoner by the English and met and married John Rolfe. Mr Colum handles the matter fairly well - I don't know the actual history of it, beyond the extremely bare bones, but he has Rolfe as the negotiator trying to trade Pocahontas back to her family for some Englishmen whom Powhatan holds captive, and the way he plays the marriage proposal is that Rolfe promises Pocahontas she can soon return to her home, but Pocahontas says she'd rather come back and stay with him. Which... of the possible ways to handle that particular bit of history, is one of the less icky, I think? I'd like to know how it really went, though. ;P
* And now we're back in the tower of Prince Henry the Navigator, and it is fifty years after his banquet that framed the first half of the book. (That was quick. *g*) And here is Martin Waldseemuller (my apologies for the lack of diacritical marks) with his friend Matthias Ringmann, visiting the geographical library there and being a total fanboy.
* Aw, and they meet Amerigo Vespucci! Who is well and properly portrayed, as a good and wise man, a friend of Columbus, and Definitely Not A Charlatan. Colum takes the position (now accepted by most reputable scholars, but still pretty hotly debated in the early 1900s) that the Mundus Novus, a translation of a private letter Vespucci wrote to his employer Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de Medici (not THE Lorenzo de Medici, "the Magnificent", but a younger cousin of his) about a voyage to not-yet-named-America, was pretty heavily embroidered by the translator and that its publication - which made Vespucci a celebrity - was unauthorized.
* Sweet, well-written, little bit sappy ending, where Waldseemuller and Ringmann agree that the proper name for the New World is AMERICA. End book. :D
* Ooh, the frontispiece is STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS. I like this illustrator. Wilfred Jones? I like him.
* Awww. Padraic Colum does what he does, and he does it well. The setup of this book is, that Prince Henry the Navigator is giving a great feast in his tower upon the shores of Portugal, and has invited many learned men who know rumors and tales of the lands to the west. Each learned man in turn will tell his tale, in a chapter or in chapters. The first to speek is a Greek man who will tell about Atlantis.
* And the writing is FLAMING GLORIOUS. As usual. *glee and delight* It is such wonderful writing. I could roll around in it, or wear it as a comfy cloak. It is dark blue velvet writing with stars in it. :D *hearts*
* [almost three weeks later] Okay, RL kind of ate me there. Okay, that and embarrassment over the above sentence. ;-) I keep trying to be a Dignified Professional-ish Reviewer sort of person when really I am a small turtle-kitten looking for new good word-blankets to snuggle in. ^_^
(Is a turtle-kitten a thing? Never mind. ;P)
* Our educated Greek gentleman tells how Poseidon fell in love with and peremptorily married (*koff* this is a kids' book) a lady named Cleito, who lived on the island not-yet-called Atlantis. The lady's reaction is not given. o_O Poseidon broke the land surrounding the hill on which she lived into concentric rings of land and water - a description which reminds me oddly (though this may just be me) of reading about Tenochtitlan, the Aztec-era forerunner of modern Mexico City. Tenochtitlan was a city on an island, with causeways running to the mainland at the cardinal points.
* Poseidon also makes the land fertile, causes hot and cold running spring-water to rise on the central island (wasn't that also a feature of Mount Ida near ancient Troy? I can't find confirmation on Wiki), and when the lady bears him ten children, makes the eldest the king of the central domain - including Cleito's dwelling, because apparently we are not going to be as sensitive about the ladies this time around as we were in Golden Fleece - and High King over the rest, and splits up the rest of the land among the other nine kids.
* The kingdom of Atlantis is named after the oldest boy, Atlas - not, I assume, the same Atlas who shrugged... ah, here we are. There are three Atlases! A king of Mauretania who made the first celestial globe, and after whom Mercator named his map-book; the Titan Atlas, who carried the heavens as a punishment for (if I recall correctly) going all Tower of Babel on Mount Olympus; and this Atlas, the first king of Atlantis, who gives his name to the island and to the Atlantic Ocean by extension.
* Okay. And the kingdom lasts for a lot of generations, and they have all sorts of awesome animal, vegetable, and mineral wealth; I am especially amused by "there were animals wild and tame, amongst them elephants in great numbers." Okay then! :D A notable metal found in Atlantis and no longer used as of Plato's time is orichalcum; Wiki cites Josephus as stating that the vessels in the Temple of Solomon were made out of orichalcum, and Pliny the Elder as confirming that it was no longer used. Pliny apparently says the orichalcum mines were exhausted, but the rest of the Wiki article assumes it's some sort of alloy. *interested geology student is interested*
* Ooh, cool. Comparing this description of Atlantis at the height of its glory to Wiki's article, I'm guessing Mr Colum is translating the Critias pretty closely - they both use the identical phrase "[it] flashed with the red light of orichalcum" about the innermost wall of the Atlantean citadel.
* I am not impressed by your use of the specific phrase "a sort of barbaric splendor" about a temple entirely covered with gold, silver, and orichalcum, Mr Colum. "Splendor" alone would have been quite sufficient and more polite.
* You see why I've been so concerned to add some books I knew were good to this list. The authors the Newbery committee picked out aren't dependable. o_O Unless that is another bit of accurate translation of the Critias, which I haven't read; I wouldn't put it past Plato, at all. (Oh you snotty Ancient Greeks. ;P)
* Anyway, he gets to the point where Zeus is gathering the other gods together to tell them that Atlantis is getting all dissolute and something needs to be done, and then he stops, as Plato does, and gives a quick summary - still in the voice of this Greek ambassador dude who is speaking to Prince Henry and his assembled guests - of how Atlantis might have been destroyed in floods or earthquakes; of how there are conflicting traditions (including reference to an Arab tradition, neat); and of how all they really know is that there isn't any Atlantis out there anymore, but maybe some of the other minor islands the Atlanteans ruled over are still there. He also throws in a tradition - I don't know if it's from the original writings of Plato on the topic - that the Atlanteans ruled over part of another continent opposite Europe (which we're meant to know is America), "that touches upon the real Ocean".
* Now there's a brief interlude at Prince Henry's feast, where people bring up the legend of the Antilles, and also mention the Arabic sailors who used the port of Lisbon - which is nice, even if it's only in the context of "telling of a Sea of Darkness". Most writers tend to ignore the Islamic rulers of southern Spain altogether, as a sort of Relative Whiteness Contrast: the most important people in a given landmass are the whitest ones, so that the Spanish are sympathetic as long as they're fighting Moors or Native Central Americans, but become rapidly unsympathetic when they start fighting (in Europe) English or Dutch or (in the not-yet-U.S.) whoever they fought in Florida. English again? Sorry, my knowledge of the history of San Agustin has dwindled about to the point where the only thing I remember is the remarkable anti-cannonball property of coquina rock. ;-) And I'm really tired of googling history, after my adventures with The Story of White People: How It Should Have Happened According to Hendrik Willem van Loon. (How is that object still in print? /digression)
* Mmmkay, now we have an Irishman, who will tell us the story of Maelduin. I don't know Maelduin, at all.
* Maelduin is a boy who was adopted by the king and queen, and didn't know his own parents until somebody taunted him with being adopted, on which he went home and demanded of his mother the queen whether that was true. She says "I am thy mother, for none ever loved her son more than I love thee", but he keeps pleading until she takes him home to meet his birth mother. (His birth father is dead.) And Maelduin's three foster-brothers, the sons of the king and queen, go with him, and they all stay in the Isle of Arran.
* Then later on, while he's playing at sports in a ruined church because of reasons, an old monk tells him it would be better for him to go and avenge his birth-father, on whose grave he's playing, than to be... well, playing on his father's grave! So Maelduin goes to a wizard, and gets instructions for building a boat and going to find the hideout of the "reivers" who killed his dad, and is very firmly instructed that no more than seventeen companions shall go with him in the boat.
* So of course when he's taking off, his three foster-brothers - whom he didn't ask to accompany him, again because of reasons? - swim after him and he is obliged to take them into the boat so they won't drown from being too far away from land to swim back.
* So they get to an island with a fortress on it, and they hear a guy bragging about how he killed Maelduin's birth-father, Ailill of Arran, and nobody has ever come after him for vengeance, so he is better than the other robbers, neener neener. :D (Padraic Colum did not say neener neener.) But before Maelduin can get out of the boat and kill the dude, a great wind comes up and blows them away, and Maelduin fusses at his foster-brothers for coming along in the boat and breaking his chances. Because Maelduin is Genre-Savvy and knows how to behave in a fairy tale, he does. ;-)
* Then they go and see many, many islands. And on one island there is food, and jewelry hanging on the walls, and also a little cat jumping from pillar to pillar; and Maelduin asks the cat if they may eat the food, and it's okay with that, but Maelduin's youngest foster-brother takes down a torque from the wall and the little cat jumps right through him "like a fiery arrow" and he falls down in ashes on the floor! O_O So Maelduin puts the torque back on the wall and gets the cat to calm down, and they strew the boy's ashes on the shore and go away again.
* They come to another island, with a complicated bridge of glass that isn't quite making sense to me, and they meet a lady who gives them all food and drink, and they want to stay there, so they ask her if she'll marry Maelduin and let them all live on the island with her. And she says they'll have an answer tomorrow, and when they wake up tomorrow they're on a different island altogether, as far as they can tell. With their boat. It's sort of like a combination of the Lotos-Eaters (with the "why should we ever labor up the laboring wave?" type of attitude) and the Grail Castle that goes and disappears in Lohengrin. And I am now far beyond my depth, because I only know of all these things second-hand. *g*
* Then there are a lot more strange islands, and Maelduin's other two foster-brothers are lost, one on an island of people who weep and mourn and will not be comforted, and the other on an island of people who laugh and play and will pay no attention to their friends yelling from the boat. Because Maelduin's foster-brothers are DOPES, but I guess we knew that ever since they swam after him, really. ;P
* And then they find the island of the Fountain of Youth, and see an eagle bathe in it - which is correlated to a verse in the Psalms, "Thy youth is renewed as the eagle's", which, what - but only one of the mariners dares to bathe in it too, because the rest of them are afraid that it won't work for them or that the eagle has left poison in the water, or something. He apparently does die eventually, because Padraic Colum says that "for as long as he lived" he was hale and hearty and so forth.
* On googling this particular mariner, Diuran the Rhymer (scroll down), I find that if he's well known it's not under that name, but that he's going to recur later in the story and that he's apparently quite bold but manages not to get killed by the Laws of Fairy-Tales. *g*
* And now they come to a land of all women, and marry them (Maelduin marries the queen; I am oddly reminded of one of the stories in Golden Fleece), and plan to stay there forever, but after a while they get antsy and want to leave, even though the queen assures them they'll have eternal youth as long as they stay there. After a while, all of them but Maelduin want to leave, so they haul him off while the queen's away on
* Then on sailing along, they come to a place where the sea is really transparent, and then where it's strange and misty; and down on the seafloor they see a lot of people and cows and things. And some of the people see them and chuck nuts at them(!) and are very angry and worried about their boat sailing along up in the sky. And Diuran, because apparently he gets mentioned a lot now, remarks that probably those people had a prophecy that somebody would come and take their country from them, and figured Maelduin's dudes were the ones prophecied. Diuran does not explain why he thinks this, or whether the prophecy would specify sailing in the sky or anything. ;-) Yeah, I'm getting a little nitpicky. It's not quite as good a book as Golden Fleece, I don't think!
* Um. That's interesting. Then they come to a tall silver column in the sea, with a giant silver net draped off it, and their boat sails right through one of the meshes of the net. But Diuran the Rhymer chops off a piece of the silver net; Maelduin says "don't destroy it, for it is the work of mighty men", but Diuran says "if we make it home, I'm going to offer this on the high altar of Armagh so that everybody will believe our story". Which might signify that Diuran is even more Genre Savvy than Maelduin, or possibly just has more nerve - you'd expect him to start getting killed, stabbing the fourth wall so much - but personally... I'm just starting to suspect he really likes chopping things. ;-)
* Now they meet a hermit who tells Maelduin he will get home, and not to kill the guy who killed his father, because God has spared Maelduin's own life for so long in all these really weird adventures. So then they start sailing toward home, and seeing familiar birds and stuff, and they come to the island with the fortress of the robbers again. There they overhear the robber who killed Maelduin's dad saying that if Maelduin showed up they'd welcome him and be friendly at him, because of all his REALLY WEIRD ADVENTURES and tribulations and stuff... and so Maelduin knocks on the door, and Team Robbers and Team Adventur sit down together for a nice meal. :D Then Team Adventur all go home and tell their story, and everyone is happy. The end.
* Well, not the end of the book. The end of the story of Maelduin.
* Next up is the story of St Brendan. The Irish seem to have a lot of stories about sailing around on the Big Puddle encountering Really Weird Adventures. ;-)
* I seem to enjoy Padraic Colum's style more when I already know the story more or less, as with Golden Fleece and as with the story of St Brendan here. It's very pretty.
* I really, really wish ALL THE BOOKS were online, so that I could show you guys the first illustration of St Brendan And The Whale that ever I saw. It was a really cute illustration, in an old 1950s school reader, of the whale waking up rather startled to have the Easter fire kindled on its back, and all the monks kind of flying off his back a bit helter-skelter. ...it was a very cute whale. If I had it handy I would scan it, but I think my mum lent it to somebody. :P
* Anyway, according to this story - which I think is a bit closer to the actual Lay of St Brendan than the retelling I had with the illustration was - Brendan celebrated Easter Mass on the whale's back five different years. Because of reasons. O_O
* ...okay, that's the funniest thing. I googled Fastitocalon, because that's the name of the poem JRR Tolkien wrote which tells a similar story about landing on the back of a giant sea-monster... but WELL DID YOU EVER. Apparently in everything but the story of St Brendan, the whale-that-looks-like-land (or turtle-that-looks-like-land; the name "Fastitocalon" is anglicized from "Aspidochelone", "asp-turtle" or "shield-turtle") is a symbol of The Deceitfulness Of The Devil and the moral is "don't land on something that only looks like land, it will drown you in the deep ocean!" Instead of "if you are a good person and exploring for the glory of God, God will send you a random sea-monster that looks like land so you can celebrate Easter Mass like God wants you to".
There has got to be a paper's worth of compare-and-contrast there, about the different attitudes that produce these two stories, but I can't quite come up with it right now. Huh.
* On re-checking the provenance of "Aspidochelone" - I only noticed the "asp" variant before, not the "shield" variant - part of me now really, really wants to come up with a time-travelling crackfic in which the SHIELD helicarrier is involved in originating the legends of Fastitocalon. :D This is probably the same part of my brain that was shaped by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with the Nautilus being mistaken for a Moby-Dick-type aggressive sea-creature, when I was eight. :D
* They see more sights, and on an island they meet a very old shrivelled-up hermit who tells them they can't get to "the Radiant Land" (this is apparently the name Padraic Colum is using for Hy-Brasil / the Island of the Blessed) in their skin boats, but they have to go back home and get a wooden boat made for them to go voyaging in. So Brendan goes home, and missionizes to the Orkneys for a while, and then eventually has a wooden boat built and goes on back out to sail West again.
* Further down in the same Wiki article about Brendan's whale, its name is given as "Jasconius". Padraic Colum also names a "monster of the deep" as Jasconius; both sources note that this large fish is always trying to put its tail in its mouth but cannot because its body is too long. *mutters about whitings and the Lobster Quadrille* I mention this specially because I'm SURE I've heard the name Jasconius somewhere before; I did once try to write a paper on St Brendan (it was a very bad paper), so it might have been in one of my sources for that. O_O
* They also have an island to celebrate Easter on, in the very next paragraph, that is not Jasconius the Whale, and now I am thoroughly confused.
* Now here is a story of three hermits, before Brendan's time, who went and lived on a small island with three small cakes and a cat. (The Irish appear to like cats a lot in this book.) And they ate nuts and berries, and the cat brought them a fine fat salmon every day to eat. And they were like "oh, we shouldn't eat this, it is not Penitential enough living here if we have salmon to eat!" but an angel came and told them EAT THE SALMON, GOD SENT IT. So they did, and they sang sang hymns and things daily in thanksgiving for the salmon and their hermitage. And one of them died, and then another one died, and each time the remaining one/s buried them and did their hymns of thanksgiving as well as his own. But then the angel comes to the last hermit again and says "Why are you grumbling?" and the hermit says "Why did the other two get to die and go to Heaven, and I didn't yet?" And the angel says "because you offered the longest hymns, God has given you the longest life, but also you will get to go to Heaven afterwards." So the hermit is like "oh, okay".
And then Brendan and his monks come to the island of the three hermits and the cat (you must NOT forget the cat, Best Beloved *g* - although the cat jumps into the sea as soon as Brendan and his men come to the island, and is not seen anymore O_O), and the last hermit is very old and going to die. So Brendan gives him the Last Sacraments, and after he dies, buries him with a proper requiem and all. And then they sail away from the Island of the Cat.
* And after that, it is a great calm and Brendan et al drift they know not whither, for twenty days. And then after the wind picks up again, there is a GIANT FISH that snorts foam from its nostrils, and it is about to eat their boat - very Moby Dick, again - but another monster THAT BREATHES FIRE comes up from the deep when Brendan prays, and does battle with the foam-snorting fish! And the flame-breathing monster wins, and then goes placidly back into the deep again.
* It is really, really interesting to me, especially in conjunction with the whale-turtle-
* Now Brendan - like Maelduin - comes to a very clear ocean, full of sea-monsters (and here's our friend Jasconius again), and his men are worried that the monsters will come up and eat them. But Brendan fusses at them for being worrywarts, and sings Mass very loudly, and the fishes and sea-monsters come up to hear Mass, and when it is finished they all go swim away. :-) Then Brendan et al meet a very geometrical... iceberg with square columns?... and measure it. Geometrically. And then they go and sail away somewhere else.
* And then... ooh, this is interesting! They find an iceberg further north (this one is just identified as an iceberg, but I'd like to know what else the geometrical building of very cold crystal might have been) with a man sitting on it, on Christmas Day, and the man tells them he is Judas Iscariot, who for one day a year on Christmas is allowed to leave hell and cool off from the flames, because he once gave his cloak to a leper. And he gets to sit on a stone instead of on the bare ice, because he once filled a pothole with that stone, for the comfort of travellers.
I like that story.
* They find in the far north an island full of smoky forges and blacksmiths who chuck masses of molten iron at them. The part of me that is trying to identify what places I can says "Iceland". Ya think?
* Then they go south and find an island full of fruit and fresh water and pretty trees and birds, and one of the birds tells Brendan that all these birds used to be angels, but when the devils went bad and were cast out of heaven, these angels were... neither faithful nor unfaithful to God. So they couldn't stay in heaven, but also they were not cast into Hell... so they have to stay on Earth. - you know, I keep hearing this story in Irish contexts. Sometimes it's the fairies, sometimes it's Jack O'Lantern (well, he's more usually a human soul who was not good enough to go to heaven but played tricks on the Devil till he wouldn't be let into hell), but this is the first time I've known it to be birds. Interesting.
* Then they come to an island of silent hermits who give them written directions to the Radiant Land / Land of the Blessed / Hy-Brasil. And they sail to Hy-Brasil, and explore it but find no people. And then they come to a wide river they cannot cross, and an angel tells them this is all the further they can go, but other men will come and cross the river sometime. (I'm preeeeetty sure that last bit, about the other men crossing it, comes from a post-Columbian perspective identifying this river as the Mississippi.) So Brendan and his men sail back away to Ireland and tell their tale.
* With retellings I seem to note more the things that I didn't know yet than the things I did know. And now we come to the story of "The Children of Eric the Red" (which is a better name for it than just "Leif the Lucky", because the second expedition that tried to settle in Vinland didn't have Leif as a member but did have his sister and his brother-in-law). Which I'm pretty much just reading and enjoying it, because it's well-told and goes into plenty of detail, about old Eric and about Bjarni who first saw the shores of Vinland but did not land, and about King Olaf who wanted to spread Christianity to Greenland.
* Heehee, and here is old man Tyrker the German, who discovers the wine-grapes that give Vinland its name. :D I am enjoying this book.
* Ahaha, I did not know ALL the children of Erik the Red went to Vinland. There are four of them - Leif, Thorvald, Thorstein, and Freydis (the only girl). First Leif went and explored, and came back with grapes and wood, and settled down and was rich and respected. Then Thorvald went, and he was the first to encounter the Skraelings / First Nations people, and... hm, Padraic Colum claims he "captured" eight of the nine sleeping men he chanced upon while the ninth escaped, but I was reasonably sure he killed them. I'll have to hunt down a really good translation of these two sagas and double-check. (The annoying part about translating sagas is that everybody does it, and most of them are more concerned with the sound than the sense. :P)
* Then the third boy, Thorstein, with his new wife Gudrid, tried to sail to Vinland but got lost, and eventually wound up back on the east coast of Greenland (the opposite one from where he started), where he fell ill and died. Gudrid returned to the Erikson family farm, Brattahlid.
* Eventually Gudrid remarries, and talks her new husband Thorfinn Karlsefne - Thorfinn "the Dudely", I'm not kidding - into making a great big settlement in Vinland. It's thought that this one may be L'Anse aux Meadows. (Irrelevantly, I am vastly amused to learn that the original name translates as "Cove of the Medea", that more recently it was "Cove of Medusas" or "Jellyfish Cove", and only in the last hundred years has the Anglicized "Cove of Meadows" become The Right Name.)
* Anyway. OFF TO VINLAND. AGAIN.
* So Thorfinn and Gudrid, and about 160 other people including Freydis and her husband, and a huntsman named Thorhall, all go to Vinland and start making a settlement.
* The story of Thorhall here is reminding me that this particular saga is of a bit later date, and kind of slanted (more than the other Vinland saga) toward HEY LOOK, all us descendants of Erik the Red are so cool, also you should be a Christian! ;-) Because Thorhall the Huntsman is a worshipper of the old gods, especially of Thor, and after a while the settlers run out of food and Thorfinn is like "hey, you're the huntsman, hunt us something!" And Thorhall goes off, but when they find him after a while he hasn't hunted any food, he's just lying on a hilltop muttering. And they ask him "what are you muttering about" and he's all "oh nothing, HEY LOOK A WHALE". So - in Padraic Colum's version they hunt and kill the whale; I'm pretty sure in the other retelling I remember this story from, it was a beached whale. Anyway, and then Thorhall starts bragging, "see, Thor is a totally awesome god for a hunter, I made him a song and he sent us a whale!" And in this version, the people just... won't eat the whale anymore; I'm pretty sure, in the other version I read, they all got sick from the whale meat and were like YEAH RIGHT THOR IS AWESOME, NOT SO MUCH.
* Anyway, and then Thorhall takes a few men and tries to sail back to Greenland, and winds up getting shipwrecked in Ireland (because apparently Vikings are always getting lost in the North Atlantic, Greenland and vinland were both discovered by guys who got blown off course in a storm and then thought it was a great idea to start bragging around about "hey, I saw this new land out west, but I totally didn't land there!"), and Thorhall and all of his men are put in slavery in Ireland, and Thorhall dies there. And that is the end of his story. ;P
* (Another thing that's really striking me here is how... obvious it is that the pagan Norse didn't worship their whole pantheon equally, but kind of specialized in one god/dess or another. Like you'd have a whole group of people naming their kids various forms of "Protection of Thor", which is why I have FOUR DIFFERENT CHARACTERS whose names start with "Thor" in this chapter! O_O)
* And here is the bit of the story that gets retold the most: how Thorfinn's settlement traded peaceably with the Skraelinger / First Nations people, until a bull belonging to the settlement got angry and spooked the natives; and how the natives ran away, and then came back to wage war; and how the natives scared the Vikings with a giant noisemaking ball that they threw into their midst, and all the Vikings ran away; and how Freydis, the daughter of Erik the Red, picked up a sword one of the men dropped, and took off her shirt and pretended to sharpen the sword on her bare breast - at which the native people again ran away, because SCARY INVULNERABLE LADY GONNA KILL US ALL. :D (Padraic Colum walks a fine line here... he states that Freydis "stripped off her clothes, and she struck the naked part of her body with the flat of the sword." Which isn't quite as convincingly scary as explicitly "sharpening the sword on her skin", but has the slight advantage of very carefully ignoring HELLO SHIRTLESS LADY HERE. XD)
* ...okay, this doesn't exactly line up with the "G-rated" part of the comm description, but I'm just going to link this here because it seems apropos: Topless Victorian Ladies' Fight Club (Not Safe For Work), which is an article - with pictures, BECAUSE OF REASONS - about two women in 1892 who fought a topless duel over flower arrangements. Because people often died of minor wounds sustained in a duel, from having bits of not-so-clean fabric from their clothes stuck in the wound - so it was more hygienic to get stabbed while nekkid. But the relevant part here is, you know... topless ladies with swords. *facepalm* Why am I even pretending this comm is kid-appropriate.
* (Why am I even pretending some of these Newberys are kid-appropriate, might be a better question. ;P)
* Anyway! They go away from that place and make a different settlement, and Snorri is born to Gudrid and Thorfinn - the first white child born on North American soil. Which shouldn't be a big deal. o_O We don't know the name of the first brown child born... anywhere, do we, unless it's Cain the son of Adam and Eve? (Not that we know what color they were, assuming they existed. But given that humanity started in either Mesopotamia - if you go by Bible tradition - or the middle of Africa according to the genetics of evolution, prooooobably not pasty white.)
* And then eventually Thorfinn and Gudrid and Snorri go back home to Greenland, and after Thorfinn dies Gudrid winds up as an abbess in a convent and has her story written down, but the colony stays until either the Black Death or the Little Ice Age or a combination thereof, come and wipe it out.
* Now Prince Henry's feast has gone on all night, with the learned men discussing the stories they have heard. And as the sun rises, someone quotes in Latin the verse of Seneca, which is seen as a prophecy (Colum gives both the Latin and a translation): "In the last days there will come an age in which Ocean shall loosen the bonds of things; a great country will be discovered; another Tiphis shall make known new worlds, and Thule shall no longer be the extremity of the earth."
* And now the other half of the book will be devoted to Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, apparently? I don't know. A young Florentine, a student of Marco Polo's writings, is talking with... Columbus's future father-in-law here? O_O
* Mmkay, and this section about Columbus will be a retelling of what "Las Casas the elder" wrote to his son, based on the (now lost) full-length logbook of Columbus's first famous voyage in 1492, as well as on Mr las Casas's own experiences on voyage #2. (I am not entirely sure what goes on with these people named Las Casas, nor whether they relate to the priest Bartolomé de Las Casas who was an advocate for the Native Americans in Mexico and the Caribbean after Cortez.)
* I'm going to blitz over this half of the book a lot quicker unless it is really good, because I just don't expect any account of Columbus from the 1920s to be terribly balanced. o_O
* Ah. Our Florentine dude from last chapter was Toscanelli, the fellow whose messed-up math convinced Columbus that sailing westward to China was possible. (People who got their math right, and therefore realized that you'd essentially have to sail across the Atlantic PLUS the width of America PLUS the Pacific, knew very well that you couldn't carry enough food for that trip in the boats they had, and a bigger boat would need more men to crew it, therefore more food. Also, bigger boats tend to break up in the waves; a wooden boat, unless it is VERY strong and deep, has to be short enough to fit lengthwise between the waves in a storm so it doesn't get picked up by two at a time, and sag and break.)
(Sorry. Any time boats are involved, you are going to get a treatise from me. *g*)
* Giving the Pinzon boys credit for captaining the other two ships, and Martin Pinzon for supplying the Pinta; I approve. Columbus squabbled with them afterwards, so they tend not to get so much credit, but they were good mariners, as Padraic Colum notes.
* He's making a lot of the grumbly crew on Columbus's first expedition. Grumble grumble grumble. This crew is scared of everything! *eyeroll* And Columbus is all full of faith that there is land ahead, and if they do not discover it someone else will! And he is Encouraging his Unruly Crew! ...you know, if there hadn't been America in the way, it's very likely they would all have died of starvation and thirst, because I do not believe for a minute that Columbus would have actually turned around at the end of the three-more-days he said. He was that stubborn. And then they would have been the first people (known of to Europeans, anyway) to disappear in the Bermuda Triangle, which would be an interesting variant on the reasons for their fame. ^_^
* Anyway, they find land. He does give the Native name for the island (as far as we know it), Guanahani, as well as Columbus's Spanish name San Salvador.
* And then there is a section that just makes me eyeroll utterly, where Columbus is all "this place is so gorgeous! BUT WHERE IS THE GOLD, if I do not bring any gold and pearls back to Spain I will have FAAAAAAAAILED, I must find Gold!" and Martin Pinzon runs off on his own to look for gold too, hoping to be Better Than Columbus (which as any schoolchild knows you Do Not Do /extreme sarcasm).
* Exploring the islands; native people, pretty stuff, GOLD GOLD GOLD. Timber for building!
* We encounter King Guacanagari, the first of the native rulers to send Columbus gold. For a 1920s writer, Mr Colum really is being awfully even-handed toward the native peoples - trying to include their own names for things, and so forth. There are awkward lines like "No Christian could have been more considerate than [Guacanagari] was" (after the wreck of the Santa Maria on Christmas Day), but he is trying harder than anyone else I've seen from this decade.
* On the other hand, he keeps playing up how friendly the relations were between Columbus's Spaniards and the natives, and when he mentions that Columbus brought half a dozen "Indians" back with him to Spain... I'm not finding any reference to where or HOW those "Indians" were brought on board. Ahem. :P
* Now here is a chapter about Ponce de Leon and his search for the Fountain of Youth - done in Padraic Colum's best fairy-tale style, so I'm not going to nitpick the details too much (not that I'm massively familiar with the details of Ponce de Leon's story). But he searches and searches, and he loses all his men or they marry and leave the search, and at last an old woman - called simply La Vieja "The Old Woman" - shows him to the Fountain of Youth. But just as he is about to drink, he is shot with an arrow by a hiding native, and he dies. But it's a very pretty chapter, if lacking in history. (It is well that Mr Colum subtitled his book "Being Legends and Histories of Atlantic Discovery"; I'd be much more critical otherwise. *g*)
* Here we have historical or semi-historical accounts of the early English explorations of Virginia, and of Powhatan, and of how Pocahontas was taken prisoner by the English and met and married John Rolfe. Mr Colum handles the matter fairly well - I don't know the actual history of it, beyond the extremely bare bones, but he has Rolfe as the negotiator trying to trade Pocahontas back to her family for some Englishmen whom Powhatan holds captive, and the way he plays the marriage proposal is that Rolfe promises Pocahontas she can soon return to her home, but Pocahontas says she'd rather come back and stay with him. Which... of the possible ways to handle that particular bit of history, is one of the less icky, I think? I'd like to know how it really went, though. ;P
* And now we're back in the tower of Prince Henry the Navigator, and it is fifty years after his banquet that framed the first half of the book. (That was quick. *g*) And here is Martin Waldseemuller (my apologies for the lack of diacritical marks) with his friend Matthias Ringmann, visiting the geographical library there and being a total fanboy.
* Aw, and they meet Amerigo Vespucci! Who is well and properly portrayed, as a good and wise man, a friend of Columbus, and Definitely Not A Charlatan. Colum takes the position (now accepted by most reputable scholars, but still pretty hotly debated in the early 1900s) that the Mundus Novus, a translation of a private letter Vespucci wrote to his employer Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de Medici (not THE Lorenzo de Medici, "the Magnificent", but a younger cousin of his) about a voyage to not-yet-named-America, was pretty heavily embroidered by the translator and that its publication - which made Vespucci a celebrity - was unauthorized.
* Sweet, well-written, little bit sappy ending, where Waldseemuller and Ringmann agree that the proper name for the New World is AMERICA. End book. :D
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...also, the Irish stories? Yeah, that's pretty much how they go. "And then there was a Giant! And he threw things! So we sailed away! And then we found a cat! Gotta have a cat."
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Ever since reading First Folks and Vile Voyageurs* at age eight, whenever I see "L'Anse aux Meadows" my mental reading-voice renders it "Jellyfish Bay". (That book also talks about some of the adventures of the Ericsson family, just enough for this version to sound vaguely familiar at times.)
*The end of the book made it very clear there was supposed to be a sequel, but I've never been able to find it. After a bit of Googling, contrary to what I'd assumed the author did not in fact die before getting a chance to write it (she was 71 at the time, she's now 82 and apparently still alive), so I don't know what's stopped her. (Shame. It's a wonderful book and I'd buy the next one in a heartbeat.)