Author: dkendall

Two of the West Scandinavian languages have survived, Icelandic and Faroese, while one, Norn, originally spoken in at least Orkney and Shetland (and very possibly, Caithness, the Western Isles and the Isle of Man) is a dead language.  Faroese could well have gone the same way as Norn. For a large part of the nineteenth century, it was a spoken language, the official and educational language was Danish and active efforts were made to promote Danish at the expense of Faroese. Its survival was helped by the isolation of the Faroe Islands, low population “cburn” and that it was still part of the Nordic world.

The Shetlands became part of Scotland in 1472. There is some dispute among linguists as to how Norn declined, whether it was increasingly penetrated by Scottish and gradually deteriorated or whether it remained distinct to the end. The last speaker is said to have been William Sutherland (died 1850) although there are indications of later traces. There are many words of Scandinavian origin in the Shetland dialect.

We would know far less about Norn, had it not been for the efforts of the first man in the Faroes to obtain a PhD, the linguist Jakob Jakobsen (Jakup doctari). He was in Shetland from 1893-95. According to Michael Barnes (Jakob Jakobsen and the Norn language of Shetland), “,,,working with singlemindedness and dedication to record every remnant of Norn, he could find.  Words, phrases, snatches of conversation, proverbs, rhymes, riddles, place names – as well as other less conspicuous items”. As well as his doctoral thesis, Jakobsen also produced “An etymological dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland” (1908-21, English translation 1928-32, reprinted 1985). The death of Norn was a warning example of what could happen to Faroese. Jakobsen and other cultural figures made great efforts to ensure the survival of Faroese, in among other ways, by developing it as a written language and writing literature in Faroese. According to Barnes, “it would not be inappropriate to call Jakobsen “the father of modern written Faroese”. He also points out that, while not detracting from Jakobsen’s contribution, there have been major developments in linguistics since Jakobsen’s time.

Despite Jacobsen’s efforts, we still know little about the pronunciation and grammatical structure of later Norn. There is very little written Norn although we do have a version of the Lord’s Prayer in Norn (date unknown), compared by Wikipedia in its article on the Norn language with (presumably current) versions in Icelandic and Faroese.

To a layman, the version of the Lord’s Prayer seems to show signs of penetration by English (Scots).

Lord’s prayer in Norn, Faroese and Icelandic (source: Wikepedia)

Norn

Fy vor or er i Chimeri. / Halaght vara nam dit.

La Konungdum din cumma. / La vill din vera guerde

i vrildin sindaeri chimeri. / Gav vus dagh u dagloght brau.

Forgive sindorwara / sin vi forgiva gem ao sinda gainst wus.

Lia wus ikè o vera tempa, / but delivra wus fro adlu idlu.

[For do i ir Kongungdum, u puri, u glori.] Amen.

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Faroese

Faðir vár, tú sum ert í himlinum. / Heilagt verði navnið títt.

Komi ríkið títt. / Verði vilji tín,

so sum á himli, so á jørð. / Gev okkum í dag okkara dagliga breyð.

Fyrigev okkum syndir okkara, / so sum vit eisini fyrigeva teimum, ið móti okkum synda.

Leið okkum ikki í freistingar, / men frels okkum frá tí illa.

[Tí at títt er ríkið, valdið og heiðurin um aldur og allar ævir.] Amen.

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Icelandic

Faðir vor, þú sem ert á himnum. / Helgist þitt nafn,

til komi þitt ríki, / verði þinn vilji,

svo á jörðu sem á himni. / Gef oss í dag vort daglegt brauð.

Fyrirgef oss vorar skuldir, / svo sem vér og fyrirgefum vorum skuldunautum.

Og eigi leið þú oss í freistni, / heldur frelsa oss frá illu.

[Því að þitt er ríkið, mátturinn og dýrðin að eilífu.] Amen.

Satisfied to find in my Geologisk Ordlista (Glossary of Geology), that the longest geochronological unit is an eon followed in descending order by an era, a period and an epoch. In pre-digital times, it made sense to accumulate glossaries to avoid spending a day travelling to Stockholm to find a few obscure words related to whatever arcane corner of human endeavour I was plunging into. Now with the mighty Google, it’s hardly so, even less for me a twilight translator sated with more of yesterday rather than wild ventures into budgerigar cage terminology. I should purge my library so that I no longer have books about Kabbalah tumbling from my kitchen cupboard on to my Meissen breakfast cup (poetic licence). But I find it hard to part from my companions of the labour of decades.

Geology is a special case; every time I come to the Dorset coast and read about greensand and sandstone and gooey blue liais, I want to learn more  (when the day finally arrives that I move on from Dorset churches). I’d better keep that one for the time being, for another eon or so.

Otherwise, I’ve dabbled with place names. Around the midsummer table, mention made of Ulva kvarn, an old mill from the ancient. The many place names beginning with Ull have attracted my interest and I have a doctoral thesis “Gudarnas Platser.  Förkristna Sakrala Ortsnamn I Mälarlandskapen” by Per Vikstrand (Pre-Christian Sacral Place Names in Central Sweden). A long section on ”ul” names where he discusses whether ”Ull” was the Svears’ foremost God and hence the names or whether some place names were hydronymic. It has been suggested that “ull” was associated with the early Swedish “vaella”, to bubble up, flow, perhaps “well up” (as with tears).

If correct, it would seem an appropriate name for a mill. However, I can’t find a mention of Ulva Kvarn in Vikstrand’s thesis, Calissendorf’s Ortnamn i Uppland (Place Names in Uppland) has Ulva Vad (Vlfawadh 1344), a place where wolves waded across the river.

I am suspicious of picturesque names of this kind, ever on the look out for popular “back formations”.

We have a prime example in the town of Trollhättan in western Sweden, literally translated as “the troll’s bonnet”. It was supposed, when you looked down at the rocks in the water from on high, that they resembled the tips of the hats of fallen in the water trolls. More prosaically, Trollhättan was as far as you could navigate on the water and here boats had to be dragged (tragen) over the rock (hättan) that blocked the water way. Mundane but credible.

I don’t know about wolves fording the river at Ulva. I could look at the map and inspect the area and make some kind of reasonability assessment but this just might be an area where I must tolerate the dark of unknowing.

I’m mostly reading about the Faroes in my less serious moments. I’ve making my way slowly through William Heinesen’s Gryningssvindar, written in Danish and only later translated into Faroese.

Gryning in Swedish is Dawn so it would be Dawntime (the Dawn of Time is more mellifluent but leads thoughts astray). He takes us to a Faroes where the old traditions live on, the culture of songs important for the preservation of the Faroese language. And with a large cast of characters, which allows him to mention many major themes in island life – the increasing importance of fishing and later fish processing, religion, the missionaries and the stricter versions of protestantism, the difficulty of travelling from island to island and the freedom offered by the motor boat. Alcohol, where the Faroes had prohibition for many years. It was rumoured that he was a candidate for the Nobel prize in 1981 but said that he wrote to the Academy to withdraw his candidature as he wrote in Danish and not Faroese.

Also started to dabble in life as well as literature and I came across the following motto for the University of the Faroe Islands, which amused me:

“Mildar veittrar tendraðu ein vita føroyum stjørnuleið frá øld til øld” translated as “Gentle elves set light to lead the Faroes on the starry way from age to age”.

In my rambling around the groves of academe, I’ve yet to come across an academic who self-identified as a gentle elf. It sounds pleasantly Hobbityish.

After two months of wandering, urgent matters took time to attend to; I’m still some way off being able to operate seamlessly from my important anywheres. But now I’m settling and my fast-breeding projects are becoming more disciplined and chaste.

Among my more light-hearted occupations, I’m  preparing for a trip to the Faroe Islands in early August.

Knowing Swedish, it’s just about possible to stagger through written Faroese on familiar topics.

”Samgongan hevði mist meirilutan, um løgtingsval var nú. Tað vísir veljarakanning, sum talgilda blaðið hjá Portal.fo, Vikuskifti, kunngjørdi í gjár”.

I love the ancient letters which were used in Old English and now still appear in Icelandic and Faroese. Icelanders and Faroese may be able to understand one another at a very basic level. The sound system of Faroese is, I believe, closer to Norwegian than Danish but the course of inter-Nordic communication would hardly run smooth.

The language was very much a spoken language used most in informal family contexts until at least the latter part of the nineteenth century. Danish was the language of the law and education and children were at least discouraged from using Faroese at school (reminiscent of the treatment of those speaking Tornedal Finnish in northern Sweden).

Jörgen-Frantz Jacobsen wrote his internationally known novel “Barbara” in Danish, later translated to Faroese, as did William  Heinesen with Gryningsvindar among other works.

The situation reminds me of Malta, where Maltese is widely spoken in everyday, familiar use but where English dominates in commercial and formal use.

In the nineteenth century, much work was done by on the orthography and grammar of Faroese and its status has gradually improved since then. According to Wikipedia, Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb and the Icelandic grammarian and politician Jón Sigurðsson published a written standard for Modern Faroese in 1854, which still exists.^[10] They set a standard for the orthography of the language, based on its Old Norse roots and similar to that of Icelandic” and “In 1937, Faroese replaced Danish as the official school language, in 1938, as the church language, and in 1948, as the national language by the Home Rule Act of the Faroe Islands”. 

The islands were occupied by the British in the second World War, which spurred hopes for independence (like Iceland). It also apparently led to the Faroese developing a taste for fish and chips and Cadbury’s chocolate.

There was a referendum in 1947, just over 50% being in favour of independence from Denmark. The numbers involved, however, were small, the total vote count being just over 11,000. The Danish government didn’t recognise the referendum result but, after a further general election, gave the Faroe Islands an autonomous status but still within the state of Denmark and with the Danish King as head of state. This status has allowed the Faroes Islands not to be part of the European Community and its habitants, while being Danish citizens do not have the right of freedom of movement in the Schengen area (they can, however, move freely within the Nordic countries by earlier treaty).  I believe the Faroese political parties are split on the independence question. The Faroese are culturally, linguistically and economically distinct from the mainland Danes but the total population is only just over 50,000 and presumably many  younger Faroese value the ease of access to the Danish education system provided by common statehood.

I’d like to find out more about the trade relationship between the Faroes and the EU.

I hope also to find out more about ownership of the Faroese economy. Fishing (and presumably fish processing) have been the most important industry by far although attempts have and are being made to diversify. Russia has been one of the most important countries for Faroese exports. Foreign ownership of Faroese concerns (fishing-related presumably) has been an issue and there is apparently a deadline (in about 25 years,  I believe) when it is to be ended, although that deadline has recently been pushed further into the future.

I’ve recently read and enjoyed Jacobsen’s Barbara and am now reading William Heinesen’s Gryningsvindar. The fine old paperback (published in 1935) is a pleasure in itself with its inscription “Lilla morfar, God Jul” från Ingrid. I see it was translated by Elsa Thulin (1887-1960) whom I had never heard of before but who was a highly regarded literary translator and who also worked hard to improve the poor payment offered to literary translators. Looking for information about her, I find a list of Swedish literary translators (Svenskt Översättarlexikon) and am struck by my only recognising a couple of names on the rather long list. Another gap in my knowledge of Sweden,,,

I’ll probably try and buy a copy of Barbara in Faroese when I’m in Torshavn and work my way through a chapter of two with the aid of a parallel text in Swedish. I´ve done that before with some success with German literature although the novel I read was too interesting and I wearied of the plod and sped ahead with the English translation.

But if I managed to read Barbara in Faroese, it would be a step in learning about the history of Scandinavian languages, which I would like to do.

Near our hotel is the church of St George Tombland. It’s not, however, as one might think a quirky mediaeval way of describing the graveyard; the word “Tombland” is older originating from the Old English/Anglo-Saxon word for an unused (vacant or empty) plot of land, “tom”. Many words of Germanic or Nordic origin would have been lost by the Middle Ages and replaced by Norman French. The “b” was probably added to make sense of the “tomland” (in fact making nonsense of it). This makes immediate sense to a Swede where the word “tom” is alive and kicking and means exactly “empty”. I treasure these moments when my Swedish helps me better understand what just looks quirky in English.

Another favourite of mine is “lych gate”, the covered gate to a churchyard. It makes no immediate sense to a modern English speaker, other perhaps than a very vague association with “lichen” attached to ancient wood. But a Swede would not be surprised to learn that it was the gate through which the pallbearers carried the corpse into the church, “lik” being the Swedish word for corpse.

Here in East Anglia, we are in the Dane Law, the part of England ruled for some considerable time by the Danish King, east of the Roman road, Watling St. Even after the end of the Viking period, a considerable number of Scandinavians remained settled in England. The relevant volumes of the Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s massive account of the resources of the conquered country, contains plenty of Scandinavian names, for instance, in Lincolnshire (I’ve not checked Norfolk yet).

But it seems to me as if the history of the Dane Law has been poorly integrated into the history of Britain. Our focus on the period is centred on the Anglo-Saxons, Alfred of Wessex and the resistance against the Vikings. I don’t know so much about the history of history, when the Anglo-Saxons became as it were rehabilitated as England separated from the French and its power grew. But the Anglo-Saxons were admitted to official history, they became “us” and identity with the Normans weakened. The Vikings were also others. But at the same time, there is much evidence that this was anything but a temporary incursion – the large quantity of Scandinavian place names, the impact on the language and the development of the law. I would like to learn more about this but the written record seems sparse, or at least we are not spoon fed with what there is to know as with Alfred and his burnt cakes and other derring do. Perhaps one should look at Danish sources.

My visit to East Anglia has whetted my appetite for exploring this area of England. I’ve been here before but I don’t know it well. First camping beside a main road just west of Norwich, perhaps near Dereham, in my teens when I was immortal so no worries about lorries mounting the verge. But then I flashed straight past Norwich on my way to the coast and south. And then again when I studied at Essex University in Colchester close to the border between Essex and Suffolk. As an active member of the Students Union, I visited the University of East Anglia, another new University, a few times but I remember hardly anything of these visits, neither the city nor the university, just a few scenes from a trip when I was accompanied by my then girlfriend.

And more recently, I spent an enjoyable day exploring the coast between Cromer and Sheringham with a few hours between trains in Norwich on the way home; enough to note that it was a fine city but not enough to see it properly.

This time has been better but I’ll come back and explore more, including the Suffolk coast which has been on my list for a long time.

Waking up at 05.00 in the cathedral city of Norwich, my thoughts turned to the etymology of “nutmeg”, which has reached us from Old Occitan, also known as Old Provencal, closely associated with Catalan or perhaps Old Catalan. I don’t know whether langue d’oc is synonymous with Old Provencal or whether Old Provencal is intermediate between langue d’oc and langue d’oil. The southern French dialects (or languages,,,) should show the imprint of Vulgar Latin to a greater extent than the French referred to as langue d+oil where the Germanic language of the Franks to some  extent overlaid the previous influence of Latin. I would like to know more about this and have a few books on the history of French as well as a Provencal-French dictionary and the more doubtful benefit of Robinson Crusoe in Provencal. This project has not got off the ground as I would like . it would feel very satisfactory to have a project related to the French language.

Weakly remembered sloppy surfing brought me to the “punt volat”; the fly point or middle dot used in Catalan to separate, for example, two “l”s which belong to different syllables. The middle dot has a fascinating, if somewhat arcane, history. It was apparently in use to mark decimals before international standardisation led to the present location of the decimal point (although my source does not tell me why standardisation didn’t succeed in uniting users of the decimal comma and the decimal point).

I learn that at the time of decimalisation in the UK in 1971 the powers that be would have preferred to use the middle dot to separate pounds and pennies but that lower decimal point on the line prevailed, pushing aside official preferences.

I found a book which I almost bought “An introduction to Old Occitan” but couldn’t come to terms with the publisher’s website, probably because my computer is a harsh environment for all kinds of pop.ups. But Uppsala, being the wonderful place it is, there is a copy at the library and it can be read free on the net.

The morning is spent translating, edging back to the protestant work ethic after all my gallivanting. This time I was only back in Sweden for four days before resuming my headlong flight to the nearest border. But when I go back on Monday, I hope to stay for a while to enjoy the habitable part of the Nordic year. Socially it’s been a satisfactory summer but I have read less than I planned. I would like to think of myself seamlessly following my projects undisturbed by location but it’s not been quite like that.

The day ends with “ragamuffin” – I don’t remember how I got there, not from nutmeg anyway. The etymology is probably from Piers Plowman in Middle English where ragamuffin is a devil, presumably clad in rags.

Although in fact it´s not the end of the day as there is a concert at 22,00, which will probably permit me to explore the strange country outside my comfort zone.

It was further than I thought to Max Gate, Hardy’s home in Dorchester, past Gallows Hill and the memorial to the executed Catholics and on beyond the by-pass. There were several places in Dorset where the old religion died hard (usually because the local lord of the manor was sympathetic to the Catholics and protected the villagers, including Chideock with its martyrs and my own ancestral village, Marnhull, which has an unbroken history of discreet catholicism from pre-reformation days).

My old body was in a cooperative mood despite the long walk and we made it without grumbling (there and back).

The house is not as secluded as in Hardy’s time; modern buildings now overlook the large partly molehill strewn garden. It was exciting to see the room where Hardy wrote Tess of the D’Urbervilles, both because it’s a favourite of mine and because of a family connection, my great great grandfather being publican of the Crown Inn in Marnhull on which Hardy’s Pure Drop Inn in Tess was based. Hardy outraged a froth of bishops and moralists, their ire intensified by his sub-title a pure woman.

Rather less uplifting was seeing the cramped quarters where his first wife  found refuge, fell ill and died, the latter part of his marriage being grim. I know more than I wish to about this and have just written a couple of paragraphs but unusually I lost my file; perhaps it’s best that my thoughts about this matter float around for eternity with all the other forlorn documents in the cyber void.

I’ve  also been to Cerne Abbas which I’ve long wanted to explore. Once a town with an important monastery, it gradually declined to its present village status, especially during the nineteenth century when the railway took another route. There’s not much of the abbey left but a number of fine old buildings. Cerne is famous for its giant carved on the chalk hillside above the village. Its age is uncertain, the first written record being from 1694 and other earlier accounts of the location not mentioning it. However, as one writer neatly puts it absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence. Ancient remains may well have attracted less attention in earlier historical periods and we can also, for example, find descriptions of Avebury, which make scant reference to the prehistoric stones, which we know were there.

The Cerne Giant has been related to a Celtic fertility god and popular etymology links the name of Cerne to this God, although more reliable sources relate it to the Welsh word Cairn, with the probable meaning of rocky stream. Recent research on soil samples has indicated that the giant may have originated in the late Saxon period although other samples produce a later sixteenth century date.

Martin Papworth, the National Trust’s senior archaeologist , has advanced the theory that the giant may have been covered over and rediscovered at some point, for instance, in the seventeenth century.

There is anyway solid evidence against it being of British Celtic origin.

It would hardly have been an asset during the monastic period, when the monastery would have been more interested in relics of saints etc. to attract pilgrims rather than a chalk giant, especially in its present form of a giant with an erection (there are theories, however, that this resulted from later tampering with the figure).

I’ve spent time in the Dorset Museum’s library and found out more about my publican great great grandfather who attracted the ire of the village by loose talk with an excise officer, which led to the prosecution of another villager (as I understand it for transporting a woman passenger on a goods vehicle without a licence). The villagers hung an effigy of Jimmy Kendall in a tree, then staged a mock funeral which passed the pub before a mock burial took place in a nearby field. This came to be known as Jimmy’s fete (the source here being a guide written by the Women’s Institute in 1940). It reminds me of the Skimmington Ride described by Hardy in the Mayor of Casterbridge where villagers outraged by what they regard as a serious breach of moral conduct organise a noisy procession with an effigy past the house of the offending party.

In two days’ time, I start my return to Sweden, well satisfied with my travels to Germany, France, Ireland, Wales and England.

Rereading my blog, it could give the impression that I want to nudge Barnes and Hardy in the direction of socialist realism, which wasn’t my intention.

From Alan Chedzoy’s “The People’s Poet”’, I understand that Barnes’ social position was more marginal than Hardy’s. His father John apparently described himself in an early census as “a labourer in husbandry” (the date 1801 is given which seems very early for such individual details in a census). Chedzoy describes Barnes’ and his wife’s struggle to make a living from running schools in Mere and Dorchester. How Barnes tried to stabilise his social position by taking a degree in divinity at Cambridge and the price paid by his overworked wife in poor health and the negative effect on their school of Barnes’ prolonged absences for study.

Chedzoy describes the conflict between the need for the Barnes to attract “middle class” parents to place their children in a school run by a family whose social status was dubious and the effect of Barnes’ ideas, his enthusiasm for the Dorset dialect, regarded in polite society as vulgar, and willingness to participate in the educational activities of an aspiring working class, activities frowned on by the burgess.

However, the contours of established society in Dorchester seem vague to me from my reading. Being the county town, there must have been a layer of people of higher social rank – judges, the military, lawyers etc. as well as the old landowning aristocracy. given Victorian England’s version of the caste system, this layer would not be on calling terms with the broad layer of folk in trade, which encompassed Barnes (just about) and Hardy’s families. Which children did Barnes cater for in his school – presumably those of the traders; it’s not clear to me after reading Chedzoy’s book although I’d need a second careful reading to be sure.

Thomas Hardy’s father was a mason. Hardy was assisted by a genteel lady (as well as his mother with a remarkable breadth of interest) but the contours of Dorchester society in descriptions of Hardy’s younger days are vague. The picture of the intellectually ambitious Hardy discussing theology and the classics with friends such as the tragic Horace Moule, the vicar’s son and others is attractive. I think, however, that Hardy’s lack of a university education cast a shadow on his work; his novels contain not a few biblical and classical references that I find superfluous but which might indicate that Hardy felt he needed to demonstrate his learning.

Hardy, the man of Dorset, also spent long periods each year in London where he obviously enjoyed being feted by the “cream of society” His life seems fragmented between Dorset and London so that it was perhaps appropriate that his remains were divided up, the heart returning to Dorset while the remainder made for the Abbey. It was not a solution desired by Hardy; I find it distasteful.

He is often sympathetic towards the common folk, although I don’t always enjoy his occasional use of them for comic relief. His positive characters are those who rise above their lowly station through personal qualities (Gabriel Oak, perhaps Farfrae) or make the effort but fail such as Jude, victim of his Achilles penis, negative towards the nouveau riche (D’Urberville). But the emphasis as I wrote earlier is on the individual, never on individuals working together to improve their lot in these turbulent times as England industrialised and the poor became separated from their means of production. I would argue that his vision of the common people is partial and romantised.

But I still think Hardy is a great novelist, even if he, like us all, is a product of his social circumstances. I was attracted by him from my school’s soft intro of Under the Greenwood Tree and had read most of his other novels by the time I left for university. I loved his descriptions of West Country nature, his architect’s eye for shape and space, familiar to me as I walked and cycled around my village on the fringe of Blackmore vale. And the stoic grimness of the fate of his characters (those not blessed with a happy ending). I wasn’t so fond of his melodrama, perhaps a side-effect of serialisation. And I greatly disliked the descriptions of his first marriage with Emma Gifford, a romance that ended in a long drawn-out death in life at Max Gate before she actually died, but that was later when I hit the lit crit.

And I suppose he struck a social chord, a young man in the country but not completely of it, who aspired to the world of ideas and wanted to move beyond his origins before later returning as  a successful writer. I’ve re-read his novels as an adult but want to do so again.

My wanderings around Europe, to Germany, France, Ireland, Wales and England are drawing to a close and in less than two weeks time, I will return hopefully to a less frozen home. It’s been an intensive experience as, besides translating, I’ve met friends and family from various stages of my life, moving back and forth in time as well as space.

In a few hours, I’ll leave the strange suburb of Elstree/Borehamwood, with its film and TV studios where seat plaques commemorating worthy folk who loved this place are likely to be cheek by jowl with information boards about Hitchcock, and where gaggles of folk hoping for a glimpse of the great cluster at the roadside, ignoring signs requesting them not to do so.

But I can breathe here, there’s a small town calm and the hotels are a fraction of the price of central London gearing up for the coronation. And there are also fast regional trains to St Pancras within easy reach of the British Library and friends in town.

But now I’m off to Dorset and have been reading Alan Chedzoy’s biography of William Barnes “The People’s Poet”, interesting as I know far more about Thomas Hardy than Barnes. Barnes wrote poetry in the Dorset dialect, which he considered to be closer to Old English than modern standard English, but which was considered by fine folk to be low and vulgar. Barnes would have liked to strip English of its Latin and Greek accretions and return it to its robust Anglo-Saxon roots so that school students would perhaps study Folk Lore rather than Civics.

More than a generation older than Hardy (1840-1928), Barnes (1801-1886) looked back to the eighteenth rather than forward to the twentieth century.  A largely self-educated polymath, his interests ranged far beyond philology writing “View of Labour and Gold” in 1859, the same year that Karl Marx produced his “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. Despite his thoughts about the labour theory of value, Barnes was not an early socialist, not even of the utopian kind. He looked back to an imagined golden past where the wealthy established justified their privileges by pastoral care of the less well endowed, who still had access to their own modest means of production before the disruptions caused by the onward march of Mammon.

Barnes has little to say about popular resistance, devoting little or no attention to Captain Swing, the Tolpuddle Martyrs or other social turbulence in the nineteenth century. “Man of the people” is thus what the Swedes would call “a truth with modification”.

Writing later, Thomas Hardy can be critical of the stressful and sometimes dangerous effects of the introduction of agricultural machinery. And highly critical of the hypocrisy of Victorian morality (in for example, Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure) with a grim empathy for its victims. But they, as are his heroes and heroines, are tragic and/or admirable individuals expressing their aspirations and making an impression on others by their personal qualities rather than being participants in collective action.

Hardy was inspired by many events that had taken place in Dorset and there are references to the wider world but his silences are significant. There is no novel about the Tolpuddle Martyrs despite their trial taking place in Dorchester. Nor did stories about the Chartists or the agricultural crises of the later nineteenth century make an appearance in his work.

I haven’t seriously studied Barnes’ dialect poetry or Hardy’s poetical work (he wrote mostly as a poet from the beginning of the last century onwards). It’s a gap in my education. I enjoyed poetry as a sixth former but since then my diet has been almost exclusively prose. I must try to correct this but need to find an annotated version of Barnes and Hardy’s poems as I am slow to interpret and lose patience too quickly.

Long High West Street past the museum and William Barnes statue, remembered independent shops selling “clothes for gentlemen”, and leather goods for the rural leisured. A few remain in the shadow of closures, charity shops and the retail hopeful at best quirky, more often mournful.

At the top Dorchester Castle visited (for some reason) on a family excursion back in the 60s where the local military had Hitler’s desk on proud display.. And on High Street and down Cornhill, cafes offering genteel teas, historically prejudiced as tea-bound farmers’ wives taking a break after the weekly shopping round and meeting husbands done with bartering livestock. I struggle to equip the women with rubber boots and get them to the market too but I think it was not so.

And then the museum with its British Celtic defender from the battle against Vespasian’s Legio II Augusta (at what is now known as Maiden Castle) with a ballista bolt buried in his spine. Vespasian is remembered at Vespasian House (a Covid vaccination centre).

And the wonderful old museum hall full of objects from Dorchester’s history with Hardy’s study at the end. Now emptied of content, a space for events, elegant and architectonically fine but for me, with the memory of how it once was, too barren, a space for those with panic fear of the intruding object. The museum revamp was otherwise better than I dared hope, even the bookshop has perked up, allowing space for more volumes of Dorset interest although the obscure shelf warmers that I loved have gone.

And at the bottom not all the way down to Maumbury Rings but in that direction, the two stations, Dorchester West much as it always was but ghostly quiet with porter replaced by digital help point. And Dorchester South rebuilt to remove the nineteenth century vestigial terminus to allow trains to go straight through to Weymouth without reversing. Weird that it took so long to do this (was the idea of an extension to Exeter so long lived?).

Beside the South station, there was the brewery, Eldridge Pope. Industrial activity close to the town centre, at the same time clamorous and calm, all very West England, and now all gone, swept away by brewery consolidation, which unmired Dorset from its fastening in an earlier capitalism. Now it’s Brewery Square shopping and entertainment centre. As an architectural solution, I don’t dislike it. It’s not tabula rasa. Old buildings have been repurposed and we can imagine the area’s history not completely unanchored. But the quiet mellow where I peacefully thrived has gone.

The market is on the other side of Weymouth Road, its present state unknown although I suspect it is not what it once was. And beyond at the beginning of the rolling green relic-strewn country, there is Poundbury, with its imitation historic architecture,  and the heavy royal hand with its Queen Mother Square and all the rest. Some individual buildings I like but it’s all appearance, the modern buildings are there behind the façade. And the styles are jumbled – it’s part village, part town and the community feels more socially upscale and dormitory than organic settlements. And it lacks connection to the glory of the surrounding countryside, reminding me more of a circle of covered wagons protecting against the outside wild.

Sometimes I feel mournful when I return, especially in winter, feeling estranged among the chic.

But I wouldn’t like it either if there was only the Dorset of my memories hanging on in shabby survival in slow collapse.  All that’s living has to develop but I am at times Greekly nostalgic returning “home” in pain.

Expecting to find that my Air BnB in the largely undestroyed old University town of Göttingen in Niedersachsen would be in a student hall of residence, my basic needs catered but not in a calm environment, I was pleased to find the apartment instead in a very salubrious area with large houses once owned by Nobel prize winners, Max Planck, an important figure in the development of quantum physics, at Merkelstrasse 12 (and died there in 1947), and Werner Heisenberg at no. 18, who, according to Wikipedia, was initially frowned on by the Nazis because of his association with the ideas of Einstein, which the Nazis self-destructively regarded as Jewish physics. Heisenberg was subsequently protected by Himmler and became an important collaborator in the German nuclear programme. And in my street lived Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, awarded a Nobel Peace prize in 1922 for his work as a League of Nations commissioner for refugees in the first world war. I wonder if Fridtjof Nansenstrasse kept its name during the Nazi period.

Göttingen is bigger than Lund but smaller than Uppsala. Finding my lodgings on the outskirts of the centre reminded me very much of my early days in Lund, liking the laid-back environment where you didn’t always bother to lock the door when you went out but where there was much, including the language, that I didn’t understand. But in Göttingen, I wondered, as I did in Heidelberg, about life in Göttingen in the Nazi period. I want to get hold of David Imhoff’s 2013 book “Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars”. University of Michigan Press.

.My visit to Göttingen university library confirmed what I already suspected, that it wasn’t the place to work on my reading list of books on India as the academic focus didn’t cater for my needs. But I was too enamoured of the picture of myself sitting and reading in a German university library to lightly do the sensible thing and abandon the idea of a visit. And I couldn’t avoid the railway station as it was on my route to France so it was easy to persist.

The town is fine, having suffered only light damage in the war with many old buildings extending all the way back to the thirteenth century. But the cold prevented me from doing it justice, the old man in me lacking the steely determination of earlier versions to complete my intended programme regardless of sporadic externals. I saw the house where Bismarck had lived when a student in the city and the statue of the girl with a goose that new graduates (or was it new PhDs) were supposed to kiss. And the statue of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), whom I took a fancy to. He was the first person to hold a professorship in experimental physics. An anglophile who visited England on two occasions, hobnobbing with George III; there were many German-English cultural contacts in the eighteenth century when the British king was also Duke and Prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg (“Hanover”) in the Holy Roman Empire before becoming king of Hanover on 12 October 1814. 

What interested me most about Lichtenberg was not his royal contacts or scientific contributions but his “sudelbucher”, a translation of “waste books”, an old bookkeeping term. As I understand these were books that bookkeepers jotted economic transactions down in before transferring the information m to a more permanent and organised form when back in their offices. Lichtenberg used his travelling notebooks in much the same way (lettered alphabetically I believe), transferring his jottings and ideas to structured notebooks when back in his work room. His notebooks have subsequently attracted attention from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Jacques Barzon; not sure whether it was his travelling notebooks or the sanitised home versions they admired.

For years, I have had a problem with notebooks. I like having a notebook with me to jot down words and book titles, practical things and whatever cerebral flotsam and jetsam that catches my fancy. But I’m too promiscuous as I fall in love with notebooks at the flick of a creamy page and acquire more and more. And I have become increasingly preoccupied by my obvious need for a notebook policy. A couple of years ago, I took the radical step of collecting every notebook I could find, dividing them into virgin and used, and then categorizing them, but carrying around separate notebooks for etymology, vocabulary/language, book titles, memories, associations etc. is too cumbersome. Instead, they have to be on a shelf in my work room and I will have a general notebook or perhaps binder that I carry with me before transferring my info to my shelf of books at home. Not quite sure yet how this is going to work as home is an infrequent place but I am convinced that a Lichtenberg solution is the way to go, perhaps a digitalized Lichtenberg solution.

I somehow doubt that my collection of notes, scribbled by the Delphic oracle after having taken LSD is going to attract future praise from the latter- day equivalents of Tolstoy and Wittgenstein.

I’m also grateful to Lichtenberg for having led me to read about Jacques Barzon, who lived from 1907 to 2012, according to whom “Old age is like learning a new profession and not one of your own choosing” (he had a few years to sharpen his act in this area). I’d never heard of him before but he was an active writer from 1927 to 2004 and published what some people regard as his magnum opus: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present in 2000 at the age of 93. I must find out more about him; I will undoubtedly find much that I don’t agree with but also the admirable.

So thank you for that Göttingen, despite the almost inaudible voice of the past dubious