For anyone interested in turn of the century best sellers, here’s a link to an e-text of Mrs. Wriggs and the Cabbage Patch.

Fun facts I learned today:

1) You can buy toilets on Amazon.com. A lot of toilets.
2) Some of those toilets cost over $12,000, but Amazon will save you up to 25%.
3) One of those $12,000 $9,000 toilets is designed to compliment bathrooms with medieval decor.
4) Some people have bathrooms with medieval decor. Wow.
5) Those people include Tina Turner and Boris Becker.
6) I probably should have put “scare quotes” around “medieval.”
7) People who bought the “medieval” toilet at Amazon also bought several books about spinning yarn and 4.5lbs of Chiquita bananas. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Here is said $9,000, or possibly $12,000, medieval toilet: The Dagobert, by Herbeau.

According to some ad copy on the Herbeau website, the Dagobert toilet was “Inspired by Dagobert, the last ruler of the 8th Century French Merovingian dynasty.” According to the same ad copy, the features of this toilet include an ashtray, a candle holder, a hand-painted toilet bowl, an ash finish, and the ability to play the 18th-century nursery rhyme “Le Bon Roi Dagobert” when the lid is lifted.

I wonder in what way it was inspired by “Dagobert, the last ruler of the 8th Century French Merovingian dynasty.” According to Wikipedia, there were 3 Merovingian Dagoberts, two of whom were 7th century rulers, and none of whom were the last of the Merovingian dynasty. That honor belonged to Childeric III, but really, who would want a toilet named Childeric III?

For those interested, here are the lyrics to the rhyme that inspired a $12,000 toilet:

I definitely need a toilet named after a king whose fashion sense inspired Kris Kross.****

—

*Dagobert is the name that Scrooge McDuck goes by in Dutch, German, and Hungarian editions.**
**Bonus fun fact: As of this writing, the entry for Scrooge McDuck at Wikipedia is a couple hundred words longer than the entry for that guy what wrote the Iliad.***
***To be fair, Scrooge McDuck’s life is better documented.
****They who will make you jump, jump.

This post is part of my continuing commitment to stay a couple of months behind pop culture. A while ago, Something Awful proposed the new sport of Wikigroaning. As described in the original article:

The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called “Knight.” Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we’ll go with “Jedi Knight.” Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. (We’re calling it Wikigroaning for a reason.)

Here is my late contribution to the sport (wordcounts approximate):

The Knight’s Tale (Chaucer’s): 440 words / A Knight’s Tale (2001 movie): 910 words
The 9th Crusade: 1,200 words / Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: 2,400 words
The Canterbury Tales: 2,200 words / Duck Tales (cartoon): 3,500 words
Dark Ages (time period): 2,600 words / Perfect Dark (2000 Gamecube game): 5,400 words
Battle of Agincourt: 3,900 words / Medieval: Total War (video game): 5,400 words
Holy Roman Emperor: 1,200 words / Emperor Palpatine(Star Wars): 6,700 words
Dukes (nobility): 3,900 words / The Dukes of Hazzard (TV show): 10,100 words
Geoffrey Chaucer: 6,700 words / JRR Tolkien: 14,500 words

Granted, most medieval topics fail to meet the initial standard, “a useful article that normal people might read.” Full disclaimer: I use Wikipedia about 15 times a day to track down Pope Thisorthat or King Whatshisface, so who am I kidding with this show of elitism, really?

Is this why the Atlanta Journal and Constitution is not considered a serious newspaper? Witness:

Historically, the hero often outlives the tale. Odysseus survived “The Odyssey.” Beowulf lived into old age.

SPOILER WARNING: Beowulf is killed by the dragon at the end of Beowulf.

Yes, that quote is from an article titled “What if Harry Died?” No, I’m not obsessed with the boy wizard like I was with Dan Brown. I may, however, become obsessed with the Beowulf movie that’s coming out in November, especially if they give it the tagline “Grendel’s mother as you’ve never seen her before!” Here’s an exclusive first look at the character, via Film Focus.

In a recent interview, the movie’s writer, Neil Gaiman, had this to say about the movie’s faithfulness to the source material: “It’s very faithful to the source material although the source material didn’t have Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s mother.” SPOILER WARNING: The source material had a twisted trolldam as Grendel’s mother.

I blogged about this back when it was first announced, and I’m glad to see that motion-capture technology has allowed Gaiman to utilize Angelina’s impressive assets even though it’s an animated film. I also eagerly await the gratuitous cheesecake version of Wealhtheow.

To be fair to Mr. Gaiman, I realize that it’s very hard to get a movie made in Hollywood without prostituting your artistic vision. Presumably all movies that are greenlit these days must have an answer for the executive who says “Yes, this is all well and good, but I’m not seeing a part for Angelina Jolie here.” Gaiman probably spent all his clout fighting off the executive who demanded they make Wiglaf into “a hip, sarcastic sidekick for Beowulf, sort of Donkey from Shrek mixed with that dragon from Mulan.” SPOILER WARNING: In the Anglo-Saxon poem, Wiglaf is not a sassy talking animal voiced by Eddie Murphy.

My intermittent Google-news trawl brought me this quote from a press release on AScribe, which is of those wire services that local newspapers turn to when it’s a slow news day, the same sort of service that no doubt brought us Medieval Underpants: the Reckoning.* Anyway, here’s the quote:

Some critics might not regard the Harry Potter series as great literature, but people still will be reading the books 100 years from now, predicts a Duke University graduate student of medieval literature.

“In my field, we’re still reading texts that exist in a single manuscript that has survived 500 years,” says Heather Mitchell, a Ph.D. student in the English Department. “There are already 325 million copies of these novels in print, so I anticipate we’re going to be reading Harry Potter 100 years from now whether people think they’re literature or not.”

First, why does no one call me up and ask for quotes? I’ll happily provide any newspaper with a hilarious and/or thought-provoking blurb about any medieval topic, especially the ones I don’t know much about. The headline to this release even calls her a “Duke expert.” If all you have to do is be a PhD student, then from now on everyones referring to me as “Yale expert That Got Medieval Guy.”

Second, there are professional academics who read all kinds of weird things. Even Orm’s Ormulum.** This has little to do with what ‘we normal people’ read or will read in 100 years. There are very few 500-year-old single-manuscript modern bestsellers out there. About all there is is Malory’s Morte Darthur. It’s about 500 years old, give or take, and does exist in only one manuscript that was found on a shelf in Winchester College in the 30’s. Though the large number of printed copies put out by Caxton probably factors somewhere into its continued popularity.

Finally, let’s put the bestseller plus 100 years theory to the test. According to various internet sites of dubious legitimacy, the #2 bestseller for the year 1902 in America, as well as the #6 bestseller in 1903, was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch by Alice Hegan Rice. Now, I know we all have a copy of that on our shelves, so I won’t need to tell people that its chief claim to fame was that it was made into an equally unforgettable film in 1934 starring W.C. Fields. And how many times have we all read Frances Little’s The Lady of the Decoration, Winston Churchill’s Coniston, or May Augusta Ward’s The Marriage of William Ashe–#1 bestsellers from 1907, 1906, and 1905, respectively.

OK, I’ll stop picking out the weirdest names from the list and just link it, but I could go on and on. For the entire 1900’s, the only two names I recognize on the list are Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and the House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. The first is read, I’ll grant you, but I challenge you to find anyone who’s read the second. Sure, it’s assigned a lot in literature classes, but nobody’s ever read it, not even the screenwriter of the movie version starring Gillian Anderson.***

According to a class on women in American literature I once took, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson’s Macaria was the best-selling novel of the Confederacy, a book so important that it was banned and burned by Union troops, and not even Civil War re-enactors read it today. Just because something sells a lot of copies doesn’t mean it’s going to be treasured for generations to come.

—

*Which, incidentally, was my most popular post in a long while. From now on, I’m going to work underpants in wherever I can.
**Which, incidentally, has the coolest name of any doggedly uninteresting medieval text.
***Incidentally, it’s comments like this which are going to make my job hunt interesting next year. [Them: Now, it says here on your blog that no one ever reads the House of Mirth. Are you aware that our department head is the world’s leading House of Mirth expert? Me: That proves nothing. There are people who claim to be experts on Finnigan’s Wake, too, and you don’t expect me to believe that they’ve read that, do you?]

As my recent bloghits testify, mixing the word “underpants” in with your “medieval” is a surefire way to increase your web traffic. Exhibit #2 for this trend is the sudden flurry of posts and articles referencing the possible role that underpants had in increasing medieval literacy rates. The nutshell version of this is that when people moved to towns, they started wearing underwear, and when their underwear was no longer worth wearing, it became rags. The rags were made into paper, and paper, being much cheaper than parchment, spurred literacy.

I highly doubt that the major news organizations of the world have many correspondents staking out the International Medieval Conference in Leeds, which is where this titillating news item originates, in a paper given in one of the Urban Literacy sessions. From reading the various versions of the story linked and posted, I suspect that all the accounts trace back to one ur-version, possibly the version I linked under ‘sudden’ above, transmitted through The Guardian’s story, then on to various bloggers, then quoted back and forth and back and forth again.

Since I can’t afford to jet off to Leeds for the conference, I didn’t hear the paper that contained this shocking underpants-related news item, either. I assume from the source of the quote and from a quick browse through the convention program that the paper in question was Dr. Marco Mostert’s “Urban Schools, Urban Literacy, and the Development of Western Civilisation — A Hypothesis.” Since the title doesn’t mention underpants at all, and since the two other papers in that session were titled “The Use of Records in Medieval Towns: The Case of ‘s-Hertogensbosch, Brabant” and “The Use of Records in Medieval Towns: The Case of Bolzano, South Tyrol,” I’ll go ahead and admit that I would’ve skipped that session even if I had been there. And I’ll further theorize that the underpants point was a very small bit of a larger argument that had to do with urbanization as a whole, or else the other two speakers were probably pretty miffed when all the questions went to Dr. Underpants.

But in the blagosphere the subject of underpants has legs, and the use of records in medieval towns not so much. From the original quote, the distilled lesson for this factoid has become, for most blogs, “Ah, the power of unintended consequences,” which I think is an OK conclusion to take from the facts, but also a bit weird.

It’s not as if there were piles of soiled underwear lying around the towns of medieval Europe, covering all the available surfaces, thoroughly stinking up the place, until someone finally said, “I know, we’ll make paper out of them, that’ll solve that problem,” and then with all the paper lying around, people started reading and writing out of self defense. Then, bam, we had ourselves a Renaissance in celebration.

As the titles of those other papers from the Underwear History session suggest, the fact that people were living and working in cities with increasing frequency is at least as important as the fact that they were wearing, soiling, and discarding underwear while they were there. Exposed to more and more writing, these new urbanites created a burgeoning market for cheaply produced and easily distributable written material. In response, the paper makers and the commercial scriptoria churned out products to meet that demand using up whatever raw material they had around, including the ragged out underpants of all these new urbanites. But “urban” is not as interesting a word as “underpants.”

Of course, everyone needs easy-access handles to grab onto new facts by, even pedantic medieval bloggers like me. But let me add a second handle that’s at least as interesting as “unintended consequences” that’s currently popular: try “survival bias.”

The grand old narrative of medieval literacy that people like Dr. Mostert are trying to complicate is, in large part, based on surveys of the texts and manuscripts that remain extant today. Since very few books survived the passage of time, and those that did survive were things like prayer books, histories, and collections of deeds, there’s a tendency to conclude that 1) medievals didn’t have much to read and 2) they read mostly prayer books, histories, and collections of deeds. What boring, stupid people they were!

Recognizing that paper was actually quite abundant before the printing press also means recognizing that there’s the possibility of a whole lot of medieval written material and textual activity that no longer survives, because it was written on less than durable paper and treated as disposable.

It’s kind of like how the bookcase that people have in their living room is a very poor indicator of what they’ve been reading over their lives. You don’t put the trashy paperbacks out on display–they probably got wet at the beach and dog-eared rattling around in your briefcase anyway. And all the books you had as a kid are probably too precious to just put out there, and too fragile besides. Newspapers and magazines hit the recycling bin. Pamphlets, drafts and notes get tossed in the trash, along with books you once liked but later decided were not what you were into anymore. The things that go in the living room are selected for permanent display because they’re 1) impressive looking, usually hardbound 2) the sort of books you want people to think you read, 3) sturdy enough to survive being read by multiple parties, 4) gifts from family that you have to have out in case they visit, 5) bought during a time when you could afford to buy things in hardback, and so on and so on.

Historians have a hell of a time figuring out what the people of the past thought, because the people of the past were just as busy as the people of the present trying to convince other people that they were different people than they actually were. And even if those people were completely honest, the records they left are at the mercy of people of later generations and what they wanted to keep around. What remains is not necessarily representative of what was.

As my loyal readers are well-aware, I pretty much invented the idea of shaming people for using the word “medieval” indiscriminately. If only I’d patented that. Here’s the money quote from a press release that totally steals my thing:

The NHS has on a number of occasions been criticised for its approach to caring for patients, most famously by Bernard Kouchner, former French health minister and co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres, who called Britain’s healthcare system “intolerable and medieval”…

If Bernard Kouchner had really wanted to condemn the NHS and its practices, says Dr McCleery, he should have called it ‘Victorian’ instead.

“It was really during the 19th century, when rapid industrialisation and urbanisation had given rise to contagious diseases like cholera and typhoid, that hospitals were seen as places to fear. There were even campaigns to demolish all hospitals in the centre of London – such as St Thomas’, originally a medieval almshouse – and rebuild them in the country so people would not have to be reminded of the
suffering and death that they represented.”

I got the chance to talk to a 13-year-old Harry Potter fan yesterday, a cousin-in-law whose life is officially over because she’s going to be in Rome when the seventh Harry Potter is released. By the time she gets back to the US, everyone will have already read it.

The pleasure I got from launching into my ‘Harry Potter is a spoiled brat who gets everything handed to him’ routine and the further horrified looks it engendered from her and her 10-year-old sister was a tad unseemly, I admit. But during the conversation, I learned that neither girl has ever met an adult who has had anything negative to say about JK Rowling or her creation.

Now, lest you think that I’m wasting a blog entry making fun of two sub-14-year-old girls, let me get to my point. The elder of the two cousins met my diatribe with an impassioned discourse of her own, and I was amazed that chief among the virtues of Harry Potter that she cited was, loosely “the way JK Rowling uses Latin roots to make up new words to teach you things.”

While she is a particularly precocious 13-year-old, this sudden unbidden invocation of my previous blog rant made me suspicious. I remember loving lots of things about books at her age, but clever roots was not one of them. I do remember saying things like that, though, especially whenever a teacher was within earshot, because I remember well that that’s the sort of thing that adults would praise you for if you said. It’s not enough to say, “I like Harry Potter because it has a plot full of mysteries and cliff-hangers,” or “I like Harry Potter because I’d really like to live in a world with magic spells in it.” You need something more intellectual sounding if you want to wow the adults.

It’s very similar to how certain members of my generation will talk about the “mythic structure” and “universal archetypes” in the Star Wars movies when pressed on why they’re popular. There’s a cottage industry in explaining to people why their guilty pleasures are actually rigorous intellectual exercises and thus thoroughly respectable, because many of us are just afraid to admit that we like things because they are exciting and fantastical.*

This is why I find JKR’s “clever Latin roots” for her spells to be just so much fake learning and intellectual rationalization. And worse, the kid who is praised for recognizing that “Confundo” is at the heart of the “Confundus Curse” is being done a disservice, when she could instead be introduced to a perfectly good English word like “confound.” And I don’t buy the line that kids need to get to confound by way of confundus, that they won’t enjoy learning unless they’re tricked into it, and so on.

Indeed, it’s confounding to find people praising JKR for putting Latin in her magic language, but not talking very much about the English in the narrative language used in the actual text of her books. I just grabbed the first Potter book from the shelf and read through the first ten pages. The only word in the entire stretch that might have given a young reader a moment’s pause was “tawny,” used to describe an owl. Everything else is described in extremely conversational, thoroughly mundane English. Delightful linguistic flourishes are few and far between in the non-magical text. There’s not a word that would confound the young reader into deeper thought about the complexities of language.

I must admit, however, that I was remiss in my previous post. I let my research into the phenomenon of Potter etymological guides peter out as soon as I found a couple of jokes, and thus I came away with the impression that these guides were mostly just weird fan activity. In actuality, the cleverness of Rowling’s magical etymologies is one of the highly touted points in the guides to teaching Harry Potter that get circulated to schools and parents by Scholastic Press and Barnes and Noble. I didn’t quite realize how widespread it was until my encounter with one of Harry’s target demographic.

JKR has done a magic trick with her magic “Latin-derived” spells. She’s convinced teachers around the world that these little “teachable moments” (in contemporary educational lingo) are somehow superior to encountering English in the wild. She’s given them caged tigers and the teachers are acting like they’re on safari.

For the record, when pressed to give an example of a clever etymology, my 13-year-old interlocutor offered, “Draco Malfoy … Draco means evil.” This misunderstanding is no doubt brought to us by a Harry Potter vocabulary list floating around a classroom somewhere that doesn’t bother to point out that it’s the “mal” that means “evil,” a point that would probably be driven home by more malice, malfeasance, malevolence–heck, even some malnutrition–and less slavish adoration of the cleverness of Malfoy.

—

*And before you shout at me, let me reiterate that I fully support the enjoyment of the exciting and the fantastic and wish that we all felt a little less embarrassed about it.

Along an ultimately fruitless line of research for that last post, I discovered this small note from one of my favorite Fantasy/SciFi writers in an issue of the journal American Speech. L. Sprague De Camp, co-author of the Incompleat Enchanter, among other things, was driven to the 1954 equivalent of the angry blogpost by a request to review a book called An Index on the Weird and Fantastica in Magazines. He had a beef with the neologisms “fantastica” and “periodica”:

Evidently, Messrs. Day and Larson, and goodness knows who else in the business of publishing and bookselling, have sought to lend tone to their enterprises by manufacturing synthetic Latinisms on the analogy of the literary words erotica and esoterica, to take the place of the established words fantastic (or fantasies) and periodicals. These neologisms open up some alarming possibilities, if the habit should spread. One can imagine entering a large bookstore and reading on the directory that (instead of ‘popular novels, Westerns, and detective stories’) the first floor was stocked with ‘romantica, hesperica, and mysterica.’ The second floor would carry politica and scientifica; the third, historica and biographica; the fourth, classica and poetica; while theologica and philosophica occupied the roof and pornographica the basement.

For the record, I was trying to locate a reference to the medieval use of fake Latin like ‘horsibus’ and ‘breadibus’ in sacramental parody. I failed. Maybe someone out there knows a good cite?