A MeFi post by clavdivs (who’s been a member even longer than I have, and whom I think of when my wife and I watch an episode of I, CLAVDIVS) sent me to Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s long poem “Satan Absolved,” written in odd-for-English Alexandrine couplets, and there I found this passage:
Tʜᴇ Lᴏʀᴅ Gᴏᴅ
And thou wouldst be incarnate?Sᴀᴛᴀɴ
As the least strong thing,
The frailest, the most fond, an insect on the wind,
Which shall prevail by love, by ignorance, by lack
Of all that Man most trusteth to secure his back,
To arm his hand with might. What Thy Son dreamed of Man
Will I work out anew as some poor cateran,
The weakest of the Earth, with only beauty’s power
And Thy good grace to aid, the creature of an hour
Too fugitive for fight, too frail even far to fly,
And at the hour’s end, Lord, to close my wings and die.
Such were the new redemption.
I was pretty sure I’d never seen the word cateran before; the OED (entry from 1889) has:
1.a. † As a collective noun. Common people of the Highlands in a troop or band, fighting men. Obsolete.
(?a1513) Full mony catherein hes he chaist..Amang thay dully glennis.
W. Dunbar, Poems (1998) vol. I. 133 [Composed ?a1513]
1768 Ask yon highland kettrin what they mean.
A. Ross, The Fortunate Shepherdess, A Pastoral Tale 120 (in Jamieson’s Dictionary)1.b. One of a Highland band; a Highland irregular fighting man, reiver, or marauder.
1371–90 Of Ketharines or Sorneris. They quha travells as ketharans..etand the cuntrie and..takand their gudis be force and violence.
Stat. 12 Robt. II (in Jamieson’s Dictionary)
[c1430 Per duos pestiferos cateranos et eorum sequaces.
Bower, Contn. Fordun anno 1396 (in Jamieson’s Dictionary)]
[…]
1832 These overgrown proprietors with their armies of catherans.
Blackwood’s Magazine 65/2
1887 Plundering Caterans always ready to flock to those who promised booty.
Duke of Argyll, Scotland as it Was vol. II. 6
And the etymology:
Lowland Scots catherein, kettrin, appears to represent Gaelic ceathairne collective ‘peasantry’, whence ceathairneach ‘sturdy fellow, freebooter’ (McAlpine); Cormac has Irish ceithern, which O’Donovan renders ‘band of soldiers’, thence ceithernach ‘one of a band’.
Notes
The th has long been mute in Celtic, and the Irish ceithern /ˈkeərn/ is phonetically represented by English kern n.¹ It is not easy to account for the preservation of the dental in Lowland Scots, unless perhaps through the intermediation of medieval Latin as in Bower’s cateranos. (Stokes refers ceithern to Old Irish *keitern, Old Celtic keterna, a feminine ā-stem.)
I’m dubious about “the preservation of the dental in Lowland Scots,” but it certainly does look like the same word. The eDIL entry is here, Wikipedia has an article that doesn’t add much (it’s one of the ones based on an old 11th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica entry), and M-W says “Middle English (Scots) ketharan, probably from Medieval Latin katheranus, from Scottish Gaelic ceithearn band of fighting men.” An odd word that doesn’t seem especially appropriate to the context of the poem and was certainly not needed for the rhyme; I presume Blunt was just showing off.
I knew this word. Most likely, I picked it up from some fantasy novel, but I don’t know which one. It’s the kind of thing that might show up in The Well of the Unicorn, but the geography is wrong. (Anyway, I checked, and it doesn’t appear.) It would be less characteristic, but not impossible, in The Book of the New Sun, but it’s not there either. I also thought of the video game Gemfire, but the Elite Highlanders never receive that appellation there either.
I have always found this type of verse, with changes of speaker in the middle of metered lines, very peculiar. I can’t see how they are supposed to be read or scanned. To get the meter right, the speaker labels have to be ignored, which might work for something intended as a dramatic, multi-role reading, but it hard to do when presented with a verse on the page.
These kinds of dialogue poems always make me think of “Incident in a Rose Garden” by Donald Justice—which may have been the first one I encountered. There, the format of successive speakers really works. However, in “Incident in a Rose Garden,” the speaker never changes in the middle of a line, and only once in the midst of one of the three-line stanzas. Moreover, the poem is unrhymed and loose with the meter, and (when correctly formatted, as in the linked version) the speaker labels are placed less obtrusively off to the side.
But… but… Shakespeare!
I knew “cateran” from somewhere, though not sure where. Walter Scott?
It looks tantalisingly like Welsh cadarn “strong”, notably found in the Four Branches in the kenning Ynys y Kedyrn “the Island of the Mighty” (i.e. Britain.) As a noun it can mean “warrior.” GPC reckons it’s from the same root as cad “battle, throng, army.”
The vowels look wrong; though, come to think of it, Welsh cadarn might go back to an earlier *cadern.
I can find absolutely no support for the idea that the Lowland Scots word might be originally from Bythonic rather than Goidelic; but Strathclyde was Cumbric-speaking, quite possibly up until the eleventh century.
It’s especially odd, though, because the meaning of the word is *so* off. Who uses a word meaning “a brigand, robber, or highwayman; usually works in groups” to mean “something beautiful, but weak, frail, short-lived, and incapable of violence”?
One can find other uses of cateran in imperialist discourse by Googling cateran with select terms, such as Mahratta (here and here) and Pathan (here).
Considering the anti-imperialist message and Blunt’s sharp dart aimed at Kipling, I wondered, did Kipling ever use this word? Kipling posted the following newpaper report from the Khyber Pass:
(Hindustani يابو yābū ‘pony, pack-horse’; Afridi, a Pashtun tribe). Kipling quote taken from the paper here.
I suppose cateran entered popular discourse through Walter Scott as David Eddyshaw says. (Rob Roy here and here; another work here.)
Maybe LH readers can find other instances of use by Kipling. I don’t have time to pursue this any more, and my internet connection is bad. (A comment of mine may have been eaten, I am not sure, so there may be repeated comments from me or they may be out of order. Apologies.)
It’s not common but not unknown up here – usually in the sense of a kind of highland equivalent to a reiver, I think. There’s the Cateran Trail, which wanders about Perthshire and comes back to where it started.
I suppose it wouldn’t be impossible to take it as meaning just something like ‘peasant’ – but the rest of the verse seems to me to suggest a literal insect, as if some completely different word was intended.
I do like ‘Too fugitive for fight, too frail even far to fly’.
I have always found this type of verse, with changes of speaker in the middle of metered lines, very peculiar. I can’t see how they are supposed to be read or scanned. To get the meter right, the speaker labels have to be ignored, which might work for something intended as a dramatic, multi-role reading, but it hard to do when presented with a verse on the page.
I’d say you’re supposed to imagine a closet drama as a movie in your head, so the speaker labels (and any stage directions) are silent.
Reading it to someone might present a greater problem. Can you do voices for The Lord God and Satan?
A comment of mine may have been eaten, I am not sure
I found it in moderation, but it basically repeated the long comment you posted above, so I’m deleting it.
@Jen:
Yes: he seems to mean “mayfly.” And he actually directly opposes it to “man”, and then goes on about “beauty” immediately after, which is not a quality routinely attributed in this kind of genre to sturdy peasants, no matter how lowly, let alone brigands (except perhaps in Harlequin Romances.)
I suspect this is just a case of Browning’s Twat.
[What Jon W said, basically.]
There’s a Norw. kjeltring, Da. kæltring “scoundrel, crook, common criminal” < Fris. keltering “vagabond”. Just throwing it out there, I have no idea how a Frisian word might end up in Lowland Scots, or vice versa, or, if it could, how the phonology might work.
Ephemeran? (Influenced by καθ’ ἡμέραν ‘every day’?)
I wonder if this Medieval Latin katheranus might have acquired part of its meaning and/or form by analogy with caterva?
@Xerîb:
Maybe he got confused by “cathemeral” (which doesn’t mean “ephemeral”, but rather looks as if it might.)
Would *cathemeran fit the metre? I don’t have much of a feeling for English Alexandrines …
Afridhi is a word for which I do know the first fantasy source I encountered it in: the Dungeons & Dragons adventure “The Duchy of Ten.”
Speaking of gaming, there was a apparently a series of Magic: the Gathering “cateran” cards released in the 1999 “Mercadian Masques” expansion. This was long after I lost interest in the game, so I doubt I had ever heard of any of these cards prior to today.
Brett: that’s quite surprising (the fact that you were into MtG — not judging). Did Kipling even ever use the word “thug”?
Brett: why would it be in The Book of the New Sun of all places? Gene Wolfe is the last place I would expect it to be.
OK: just read Satan Absolved.
That is one truly bad poem.
Summary:
God has been pretty much oblivious for at least two thousand years, if not forever. The world is fucked up ecologically by humans (lots about this.) Jesus was OK, and went about saying we should all be nice, and (particularly importantly) he was ecologically sound, but the Jews (yup) killed him. Christianity started purely as wishful thinking on the part of ex-associates that Jesus might not really be dead, but rapidly became a racket solely aimed at power. White people are particularly evil, and motivated entirely by greed. They’ve conquered everyone else, who didn’t stand much of a chance because they were all noble savages. The angels were too scared to tell God any of this because they’re afraid of the white people. Only Satan has the balls to tell God how it really is. God is horrified, and apologises: he asks Satan’s advice about how best to destroy humanity (again.) Satan thinks that this probably wouldn’t be possible at this late stage, but reckons that things can be put back on track if he (Satan) is incarnated as some non-human creature (mayfly?) Apparently using apes as divine images/avatars/whatever was a big mistake (Satan does allow himself a bit of I-told-you-so here.) God thinks this is a great idea and tells him to give it a go.
The plot is the good part. The style, now …
I’d like to think that all this was actually intended as deliberate far-over-the-top satire, but it gives all too many indications of being intended with dreadful sincerity.
A pity, given that some of the points he threeps doon oor thrapples are not totally without merit …
Blunt reminds me of a number of people I’ve encountered over the years who were on the same side as me, who I devoutly wished would defect to the opposition.
He does make you appreciate Kipling, though.
@V: Wolfe used a lot of military terminology, not to mean what it means in modern English, but to “translate” a term Severian had used that was in some way analogous. Because of its purely ethnic associations, cateran wouldn’t fit with Wolfe’s style as well as peltast or pandour, which are terms that (in our world) reference both ethnicity and style of armament. However, it wasn’t out of the question that he might have used it, and I knew that (as with Pratt) it would be easy to check for the word in online versions of the books.
That is one truly bad poem.
I admire your fortitude — it’s more than I could stomach.
Parts of the Preface do indeed seem to be talking to our own times.
V says: Did Kipling even ever use the word “thug”?
Without bothering to look it up, I believe that in Kim he talks about how at a rest stop (caravanserai?) on the Grand Trunk Road, people keep one hand up in the air to avoid being garrotted by thugs.
Too late for the edit window, I remembered that the word Kipling uses in the poem about the Grand Trunk Road in Barrack Room Ballads is “every blooming camping ground exactly like that last”. Camping ground. I like the word “caravanserai”, but it’s in the wrong context on the Grand Trunk Road.
Also, in that same context I probably should have capitalized “Thug”.
Wilfred Scawen Blunt is suddenly all the rage!
That Metafilter posting from yesterday
https://www.metafilter.com/212249/To-The-Person-sitting-in-Darkness
contains among other things
“Wilfred Scawen Blunt, an Amorous Adventurer and Quail with Scotch”
https://lostpastremembered.blogspot.com/2023/10/wilfred-scawen-blunt-1840-1922-in-his.html?m=1
(I wasn’t expecting Skittles!), and
this old Irish Times article about the “peacock dinner” and the connections between the complicated amours of Blunt, Yeats and Pound, etc.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/what-happened-when-seven-poets-met-to-eat-peacock-in-1914-1.2126063
and other stuff, had me chasing him and Anne down on Wikipedia yesterday. She was quite a character as well.
It might be better to remember him for
He who has once been happy is for aye
Out of destruction’s reach. His fortune then
Holds nothing secret; and Eternity,
Which is a mystery to other men,
Has like a woman given him its joy.
Time is his conquest. Life, if it should fret,
Has paid him tribute. He can bear to die,
He who has once been happy!
Wikipedia says this poem (With Esther, this is only part of it) is thought to be a reminiscence of Skittles, FWIW.
Could Blunt’s “cateran” somehow derive from “caterpillar”?
FWIW, Wiktionary traces Irish ceithearn back through Middle Irish ceithern (“band of soldiers”) to Latin quaterniō (“group of four soldiers”).
It cites eDIL, but I didn’t see the Latin continuation there. (I might need more coffee though.)
I admire your fortitude — it’s more than I could stomach.
Ditto. I skimmed more than I read.
The th has long been mute in Celtic — Then I guess these modern soundfiles for ceithearnach are spelling pronunciations.
I think the word, although rare, is commoner in Britain than in America. I knew it vaguely and thought it meant bandit or robber, which is roughly right. It’s in the works of Sir Walter Scott, whom I revere, so that is probably where I came across it. A quick AI query tells me it’s in Rob Roy and Waverley, which I have read, and also in The Fair Maid of Perth and in Chronicles of the Canongate.
More spelling pronunciations for ceithearn here
Then I guess these modern soundfiles for ceithearnach are spelling pronunciations.
Well, I’m not sure what the OED meant by “mute” back in those ancient days, but a generous interpretation would be “reduced to a mere breathy sound.” In any event, it certainly hasn’t been /t/ for a long, long time, which is what’s relevant to the etymology of cateran.
@DE: I suspect this is just a case of Browning’s Twat.
More formally, this is a case of caterchresis.
I agree with you that Blunt seems to have meant “mayfly”, and with mollymooly that “caterpillar” may have lent some insectile influence.
The quote in the OP can be read effortlessly* as merciless iambic hexameters with a caesura that is, in different lines, in the middle or one syllable later; cathemeran would add an unstressed syllable at the end, which wouldn’t sound bad but doesn’t occur elsewhere in the quote at least.
* Well, if even is a single syllable.
a case of Browning’s Twat
or(/and) could he be reaching for “catamite”? it seems like it could be in the right archaizing literary register.
Don’t miss maidhc’s multilink comment above, which I just rescued from moderation; from his second link:
Like some other all-men-are-brothers idealists who spring to mind, Blunt seems to have been quite remarkably unpleasant to his relations (notably, to his own daughter.)
Some Borrioboola-Gha* stuff going on, maybe. (Ironically. Blunt would surely not have accepted that his noble-savage fantasies are just as patronising and racist as the White Man’s Burden stuff he was rightly objecting to. But they come from the same place. “Gee, these people sure have natural rhythm/harmony with nature.” )
I must say that “my own ethnic group is uniquely evil” and “my own species is uniquely evil” do not strike me as a sound basis for the examined life. If you can’t even manage any fellow-feeling for people from your own background, your great love for people from farther away probably has a synthetic element to it. Hating Humanity is probably not the ideal basis for active conservationism, either.
But I am probably reading too much personal detail into one remarkably dreadful poem (which was probably meant as a kind of squib rather than a considered philosophy.)
* Dickens is astute about the Mrs Jellybys of this world, but unfair about the actual story of Lokoja, which is complicated and interesting.
When I looked into “conservationist” versus “environmentalist” about 30 years ago, a lot of people were saying, “I’m not an environmentalist. I’m a conservationist.” Some of them meant, “I’m not a wacky treehugger. I want to conserve nature for economic and recreational use.” Others meant, “I’m not trying to selfishly protect humanity from pollution. I want to conserve nature for its own transcendent sake.”
I suppose it boils down to whether you think destroying our environment is morally wrong in principle or merely a very stupid thing to do. (“Merely”, as opposed to “both wrong and stupid.”)
The waters are muddied by the fact that many who in fact believe the former try to recruit support from the indifferent by deploying “stupidity” arguments rather than moral arguments.
The quote in the OP can be read effortlessly* as merciless iambic hexameters with a caesura that is, in different lines, in the middle or one syllable later; cathemeran would add an unstressed syllable at the end, which wouldn’t sound bad but doesn’t occur elsewhere in the quote at least.
* Well, if even is a single syllable.
I agree but the line quoted at Wikipedia, “The white man’s burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash.” has an extra syllable, so *caˈthemeˌran seems possible.
“Ephemeran” could fit the meaning–the OED has one relevant citation:
I’d guess “ephemera” meaning “mayfly”, the prefix “cat(a)”, and “cateran” got scrambled in Blunt’s brain. (The earliest hit for “cathemeral” I see at GB is from 1969, and the date might be too early.)
I suppose it boils down to whether you think destroying our environment is morally wrong in principle or merely a very stupid thing to do.
I remember once when I was young getting into a discussion of almost the perfect hypothetical to distinguish these: if you were the only living person in the world, would it still be wrong to destroy wonderful things? I was like: of course it would be, obviously! She wasn’t so sure.
Blunt seems like a very odd character. I knew him mainly for his hagiography of the valiant but unsuccessful Algerian freedom fighter Emir Abdelkader. To be fair, if you must go in for hero worship – and Blunt evidently did – that’s a pretty good choice of hero.
I suppose it boils down to whether you think destroying our environment is morally wrong in principle or merely a very stupid thing to do.
Indeed, but what surprised me was that the two sides used the words with reversed meanings, though I saw nothing that was more favorable about “conservationist”.
On the Browning principle, what we want is a literary passage (or passages) where Blunt might plausibly have encountered “cateran”, an unfamiliar word to him, and wrongly concluded from the context that it meant something like “humble thing/person.”
Walter Scott would probably be the best bet.
The “peasantry” sense seems to be secondary to the “irregular militia” sense: how widespread was/is it? (It seems to be an odd semantic shift, come to think of it.* Might the resemblance in Gaelic be accidental? Two different words, originally, one perhaps adapted by analogy to the other?)
* Though there’s Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg warriors, specifically, I suppose. But not even the wild hielanders were organised in castes with a warrior caste at the top. And even if they had been, calling the peasants, of all people, “warriors” seems weird. Too much Braveheart …
I was struck by the somewhat off-sounding-to-my-ear expression “impossibly amorous,” so I googled and it is not actually unique but also occurs in e.g. this bit of prose (which is perhaps not intended entirely seriously?): https://watsoniabugle.com/2019/06/27/smooth-fm-puts-local-man-in-impossibly-amorous-mood-%E2%80%AAat-4-15pm%E2%80%AC-on-a-week-day/
It seems clear that some sort of insect is intended by “cateran” — above, “mayfly” is suggested, but I’m wondering if perhaps some short-lived butterfly would be better described as having “beauty’s power”
Would it necessarily have been an English word? Blunt is supposed to have learned many languages — could there be some word for butterfly, or some specific species of butterfly, from the languages he knew, that sounds like “cateran”?
A tongue-in-cheek suggestion: maybe a series of mishaps occurred. He originally wrote “‸-an”, that is, “[caret-sign]-an”, to indicate that he wanted to find an insect word with that rhymed with “man”, to be inserted when he found it. This was then literally written out as “caret-an”, and then some copy-editor looked at that, said “Is that even a word?”, and looked up and found and substituted “cateran”, satisfied at having corrected a spelling mistake.
I agree that he must have been thinking of an insect. Mayflies can be pretty. (Actual length around 2 cm, not including cerci.)
It’s clear that we need some kind of catercorner approach.
We should subcatergorise our various suggestions as to just what is was that caterlysed Blunt’s caterstrophic malapropism in a convenient caterlogue.
We should not dogmatically exclude any possibilities a priori. A more catherlic approach is called for.
Could there be a French-derived term (maybe not modern French, but Norman French?) of something like “quarte-an” (“fourth of a year”), because mayflies were thought to arise during a three-month period?
I wondered about confusion with “caitiff”, but that seems a stretch.
“Quartan” immediately suggests to me “quartan ague”, an excellent older name for the pathetic weaksauce sort of malaria caused by Plasmodium malariae, which doesn’t even kill people much (but lingers in a sneaky underhand manner so it can relapse later.)
Real Men get tertian ague, malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum, which is properly hardcore. You either die or get better. A proper disease.
“Quartan” = three-day, “tertian” = two-day. (Naturally.)
I also wondered at “Scawen”.
Ancestry.comsays “see Scowen”.Scowen says: “from Middle Cornish scawen ‘elder-tree’”
(Source: “The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, 2016”)
Hm. A different site (
https://www.houseofnames.com/scawen-family-crest) also points to the name being held by the people of Cornwall, but says: “The name, however, is derived from the Old German word scouwon, meaning to look, and indicates that the original bearer lived near a lookout point such as a hill or cliff.”Huh. Wikt does have scouwon with that meaning (Old Dutch/Old High German). But at least to me, it seems more probable that Cornish people would name themselves using a Cornish word, rather than an Old Dutch one.
Ah. Welsh ysgawen, plural ysgaw (following the usual pattern for tree names.) GPC has no cognates outside Brythonic.
I agree: Cornish seems vastly more likely.
The “Old German” suggestion is ludicrous: not only because of the sheer improbabilty of the Cornish name actually deriving from an accidentally similar German verb infinitive, as you point out, but also because “to look” is a deeply unlikely place name, and last but not least, that it can’t be made to work phonologically at all.
The site seems to exist to flog tat to Americans.
It should be the same morpheme as in the more common name Boscawen.
Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boscawen-Un
The bos bit is Cornish “abode, dwelling” (= Welsh bod, Old Irish both.)
Good to see the Cornish adopting the Kusaasi custom of calling places after trees.
Not clear from the WP article if the Triad referenced there was one of the many invented by Iolo Morganwg, a notorious forger. The stuff about ancient druids is of course all bollocks. The attribution of the (genuine) Welsh Triads to the sixth century is also bollocks.
The explanation of the toponym is pukka, though. More or less.
i think the “conservationist”/”environmentalist” stuff is largely less about ideology than about different generations/periods of activism and organization-founding – which do parallel ideological differences, but only loosely. and at this point, i think it can be easier than in the past to see the points of convergence, whether good*, bad**, or debateable***, although the separation does persist.
.
* global warming as a central focus; increasing use of ecosystem- and bioregion-scale analyses.
** a tendency towards entanglement with eugenicist and other white supremacist politics.
*** a drift towards lobbying and away from direct action to preserve and defend threatened tracts of land.
The deplorable Madison Grant (who came up here recently) is called a conservationist in his WP page, and he would probably approve. But so is Rachel Carson in her WP, and I think of her as a quintessential environmentalist, looking at broad and widespread issues more than localized ones.
a tendency towards entanglement with eugenicist and other white supremacist politics
This goes back quite a ways (as you’ll know better than me.)
It’s part of the reason the humanity-hating strain of conservationism/environmentalis alarms and repels me. Quite apart from the fact that I myself identify as human these days, humanity-hating all too easily gets transmuted into the idea that particular groups of humans (not us) are the real problem. Third-world overpopulation …
I think our Ysgawen Blunt was a lot nearer this mindset than he himself appreciated. Romanticising non-Europeans as noble savages in tune with nature is just substituting a fantasy for real people that you might need to, like, actually engage with as human beings like yourself. Much like misogynists idealising imaginary women who are quite unlike any real female human beings. (Or any kind of human being at all.)
(Lord, that is one bad poem … and I don’t just mean technically and from a literary standpoint, though, yes, that too.)
What Blunt should have being inveighing against was Real Existing Capitalism, not his imaginary Anglo-Saxon Race. He illustrates the flip side of Kronawetter’s “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_is_the_socialism_of_fools
That might have got him into rather more trouble than a spot of trendy fin de siècle blasphemy, though (and have required a bit more self-examination on his part.)
@DE: absolutely agreed. and the idea of a natural hierarchy of worth(iness) is as easy to get to from the human-hating direction as from the self-exalting/justifying one.
Anti-people soi-disant conservationism has been getting a well-deserved bad name especially recently, when wildfires have been highlighting how much the ecology of the West depended for millennia on people to maintain its health, and how much damage has been caused by preventing them from doing so. Some places have had people and plants and other animals arriving at the same time right after deglaciation, and for them especially, the concept of a people-free natural environment is absurd.
Well, yes, if people don’t want wildfires to happen, they need to do preventive maintenance of vegetation. Another solution is to let them happen, and not build houses where they do, or live in cheaply rebuildable homes. That’s probably how most cultures managed in the past. With climate change and all, we’re probably at the tail end of the times where you can build a house and expect to live in it for a hundred years (or sell it at a profit, or get all-risk insurance).
I don’t think, by the way, that rewilding or the like is anti-people. It gives me pleasure to know that old tree trunks are left in place so rare fungi and beetles can live there. I’m people too, not just the house owners. And if it happens enough, you don’t have to fence in the one old oak in Denmark where a rare species can breed to prevent children from playing there and accidentally killing it. There’s room for a thousand of them.
i think AntC’s point – and certainly one of mine – is that the “wild” in “re-wilding” is usually meant as excluding meaningful human presence, even when there has been no version of the ecosystem in question that was not significantly shaped by humans*. sometimes (often) “re-wilding” is very directly a rejection of a resumption of indigenous land stewardship (whether in relation to sámi, anishinaabe, black seminole, or maori communities) rather than an embrace of it; checking whether an environmentalist/conservationist group rhetorically positions the two in opposition or alignment is one of the clearest ways to tell whether they lean towards or away from the ecofascist strain in the movement. and that matters a fair amount in comparatively densely settled areas, where the practice can be equally lovely regardless of the rhetoric/ideology – in part because the goal logistically can’t be to completely remove human communities.
.
* which isn’t to say that’s the only time “re-wilding” should involve close human relationships to the land, just that the anti-human version is most transparently foolish there.
@rozele, I’m not aware of exactly how the politics play out as regards the Sami in Sweden and the traditional hunting and fishing in Greenland, but I can well imagine that will be NGOs claiming that the reindeer would be better off without the Sami driving them to ‘better’ pastures. (Which is probably what they would have done anyway). The complications have more come from national borders (Sweden/Norway, Finland and Russia to some extent) and from anti-whaling conventions. There was some international attention about the gríndadráp in the Faroes last year, I think, and yeah, despite recent changes to the regulations it doesn’t really live up to animal welfare ideals. (Pilot whales are a species of least concern, and the hunting of larger species was made illegal in 1984).
It may well be that the Sami are continuing a method of extensive animal husbandry that’s been happening continually since the first humans and reindeer arrived in Northern Scandinavia. (But IIRC, the current culture and language was pushed out of Finland when the Finns arrived from the east, some time in the first millennium. That’s about when the current Inuit culture came to Greenland as well, and IIRC they were the first to have the technology to settle the coasts. So the seals were there first. And we probably have the exact date when the first farm was established in the Faeroe Islands).
Just ran across this very apposite passage in Rachel Nolan’s NYRB review of Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World by Eliane Brum (archived; I wish somebody would tell me what
Diddy Wah DiddyBanzeiro Òkòtó means):Banzeiro Òkòtó
This is how Brum introduces the banzeiro:
The entry in the online dictionary here is very useful: ‘Ondas causadas pela pororoca ou por outra razão que chegam com muita intensidade nas praias’.
Antônio Joaquim de Macedo Soares (1875–88) Diccionario brazileiro da lingua portugueza on the family of words including banzeiro, from a century and a half ago (here):
Nowadays banzar ‘to surprise, astonish, to surprise’ (transitive), ‘to be amazed or pensive about something that doesn’t have an easy explanation’ (intransitive). For this family, a Kimbundu etymon has been proposed: kubanza ‘to think, ponder, wonder’.
This is how Brum introduces the concept of òkòtó (boldface added) and combines it with banzeiro:
Many thanks — that’s as full an explanation as I could have wished, and with a Kimbundu etymology thrown in for free!
While following links about the pororoca [which, as the link describes, is the Amazon River (and connecting rivers) tidal bore], I learned that some tidal bores in England are called “aegir” or “eagre”
Etymology: “It is said to take its name from Ægir, a personification of the sea in Norse mythology,[1] although this is disputed. A more likely derivation is from Old English ēagor (“flood, stream, water”).”
And now I’m wondering if the phrase “crashing bore” in fact comes from facetiously invoking the tidal phenomenon, even though “bore” [uninteresting person] is (probably) unrelated to the tides.
eagre
Neither derivation actually works phonologically. (Farfetched semantically, too.) The correct answer is “etymology unknown.”
The only place I can recall ever seeing the word in Real Life is in Auden’s poem “Under Sirius”:
https://www.everseradio.com/under-sirius-by-w-h-auden/
It also features a baltering torrent shrunk to a soodling thread. A kind of anti-eagre …