Young Nobles in Wolsey’s Household

Still, the bad spelling and grammar of most of the letters up to that period, and the general ignorance of our upper classes were, says Professor Brewer, the reason why the whole government of the country was in the hands of ecclesiastics.

— Frederick James Furnivall: Early English Meals and Manners

So wait, Ye Olde English being mostly incomprehensible gibberish is because the people writing it were basically functionally illiterate, ha ha?

Also~ This is why literacy is important. For example, slave owners really didn’t want their slaves to learn how to read. Catching them with any sort of letters was punishable with whipping. So there’s probably a correlation between illiteracy and being ruled by others. But as always, people can make their own conclusions.

Though, it’s important to note that there’s also an important distinction between knowing how to read and understanding what you read. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be an increasingly lost art.

Surf-swine

As I’m on holiday and I have lots of free time, I’ve started reading Poetic Edda again. There was a bit of a break when I was too tired to do much of anything.

Anyhow, according to the translator’s notes of Poetic Edda:

Surf-swine: the whales.

Now, I might be the only one who finds this funny but in Japan there’s a wild boar which is also known as yama kujira. This literally translates as “mountain whale”.

I just thought that was the funniest coincidence.

But I also made a joke about the Japanese word 好き in a fan fiction which I’m pretty sure no one noticed. So, you know.

And now I probably need to go to sleep because my head is killing me.

Onibi 鬼火

Related posts:

Glow Wood
Aarnivalkea
Foxfire Fungi

Their name means “demon fire” . . . They look like small balls of flame, usually blue or blue-white (red and yellow onibi are less common) . . . They appear in places surrounded by nature — most often during the spring and summer months, and particularly on rainy days.

Onibi are born out of the dead bodies of humans and animals. . . . They are considered to be identical to the will-o’-the-wisps of English folklore.

— Matthew Meyer: The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons

Further proof that will-o’-the-wisps are bioluminescent fungi? Don’t ask me what particular species they’d be, though, because I don’t know, ha ha.

Also, another fun tidbit: according to a recent thing I read, older literature reports that bioluminescent fungi produced blue or white light. I can’t really verify this because I haven’t read that much older literature yet. But it does fit, doesn’t it?

Hitodama 人魂

The other title of this post: ‘fun tidbits from books’.

Hitodama are the visible souls of humans detached from their host bodies. They appear as red, orange, or blue-white orbs . . .

Hitodama can be distinguished from other hi no tama by the distinctive tails of light which trail behind them.

— Matthew Meyer: The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons

“Now, some one is dying,” thought the little girl, for she had been told by her old grandmother, the only person she had ever loved, and who was now dead, that when a star falls a soul goes up to Heaven.

— Hans Christian Andersen: The Little Match Girl

And indeed, there is a similar belief in Serbia and Mongolia that a falling star symbolises someone who is dying.

Huh, actually, upon reflection, that makes sense.

. . . appeared the star that men in book-Latin call “cometa”: some men say that in English it may be termed “hairy star”; for that there standeth off from it a long gleam of light, whilom on one side, whilom on each.

— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

As usual, you may make of that what you will.

Foxfire Fungi

I don’t know if anyone recalls this post: Aarnivalkea. In it I wondered if ‘will o’ the wisps’ were actually references to bioluminescent fungi since the Finnish word for ‘will o’ the wisp’ is aarnivalkea — the ‘aarni’ being an archaic word for a giant tree. This brought to mind these two quotes:

The mole took a piece of decayed wood in his mouth, for that glimmers like a light in the dark, and then went on in front, and lighted them through the long dark passage.

— Hans Christian Andersen: Thumbelina

. . . in a rotten tree stump found some bits of glowing wood like fire . . .

— William Elliot Griffis: Japanese Fairy World

And as it turns out, there is a bioluminescent fungus! Or well, there’re quite many of them but foxfire fungi at least grow in decaying wood. I’m not going to go through the whole list of bioluminescent fungi, I’m just content that my thoughts were proven correct.

As a fun aside, the word for foxfire in Finnish is ‘peikonkulta’ which means ‘troll’s gold’. It could also be translated as ‘goblin’s gold’ which is a bioluminescent moss.

Aarnivalkea

Aarnivalkea is basically the Finnish word for ‘will o’ the wisp’. In folklore, will o’ the wisps are strange lights that lure travellers off safe paths. In some folklore, will o’ the wisps also lead to treasure which becomes relevant in a bit.

So, here comes the fun part. The Finnish word ‘aarni’ can mean either:

treasure (archaic, mythology)
or
giant; giant tree (archaic, mythology)

When I saw that definition of giant tree (which, to be fair, I probably should’ve figured out from the word ‘aarniometsä’), I immediately thought of these two tidbits:

The mole took a piece of decayed wood in his mouth, for that glimmers like a light in the dark, and then went on in front, and lighted them through the long dark passage.

— Hans Christian Andersen: Thumbelina

. . . in a rotten tree stump found some bits of glowing wood like fire . . .

— William Elliot Griffis: Japanese Fairy World

One of the theories for will o’ the wisps is that they’re some kind of marsh gas or whatever. But what if they aren’t gas? Maybe they’re rotting wood that glows? For whatever reason that I can’t discern yet but, to be fair, I haven’t really been in close contact with rotting wood. The only thing I can still think of is some kind of bioluminescent fungus or something.

I See How It Is

Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal.

— H. P. Lovecraft: The Tomb

It is not I who will tell you, but the prophet Isaiah: “They lodge among tombs and in caves for the sake of dream visions.” You observe, then, how ancient among the Jews was this work of witchcraft, namely, sleeping among tombs for the sake of dream visions.

— Julian: Against the Galileans

How the Jelly-fish Lost its Shell

This is a Japanese fairy tale in the Japanese Fairy World, collected and translated by William Elliot Griffis.

This tale depicts that jellyfish used to have shells:

In those days he had a shell, and as his head was hard, no one dared to insult him, or stick him with their horns, or pinch him with their claws, or scratch him with their nails, or brush rudely by him with their fins.

Fairy tales can be surprisingly old — for example, the Australian aboriginals allegedly have preserved their oral tales from sixty thousand years ago, East Europeans have preserved their tales from Ancient India, and the origins of the tale of Yeti might be the vestiges of early humans meeting anthropoid apes.

So being the curious, enterprising young lady that I am, I asked myself if this tale had some trace of truth in it.

It took some digging — because internet search engines are freaking useless — but apparently ancient comb jellies used to have external skeletons that could’ve been support or defence.

But here’s the problem: these things used to live five hundred million years ago. So probably not, ha ha.

Tie the Knot

I haven’t yet read a lot of Celtic literature (the phrase apparently comes from Celtic customs) but one fun little tidbit just occurred to me.

In this sombre picture the only graceful touch is the custom which lovers or spouses had of tying each other’s girdles when about to part for a time,–a ceremony by which they implied that they would be constant to each other during the period of absence.

Reading is so much fun.

Glow Wood

The mole took a piece of decayed wood in his mouth, for that glimmers like a light in the dark, and then went on in front, and lighted them through the long dark passage.

— Hans Christian Andersen: Thumbelina

. . . in a rotten tree stump found some bits of glowing wood like fire . . .

— William Elliot Griffis: Japanese Fairy World

Is this a real thing? I’m trying to think of glowing wood but all I can really think of is bioluminescent fungus or something.

Mōryō

In the Edo era (1602-1868), human livers, genitals, and brains were used as the basis for a certain medicine believed useful for treating chronic illness. The material was only supposed to be harvested from executed criminals… Theoretically speaking.

…what?

Um, well. It’s not like cannibalism is unheard of either in humans or animals. For example, the tribes in New Guinea and Australia used to eat their own children (…at least until the first half of 20th century). Likewise, in the pre-Columbian America cannibalism was pretty much a stable part of their diet.

One of the ancient Mexican dishes, called tamale, was apparently made by grinding the human remains after a year of his death and burial.

Yeah. That was a thing.