The Legend of the White Snake.

Image from the Summer Palace, Beijing, China, depicting the legend – Wikimedia Commons.

Medievalists has a fascinating look at the Chinese legend of The White Snake, and its evolution from a cautionary tale where the monk was the good guy, to a sympathetic love story where the monk is a shit stirrer.

…This may well be the fate of Xu Xuan, Madam White’s human husband, if he is not rescued by a powerful Buddhist monk. The first written version of the White Snake legend is found in a collection of novella composed in the first quarter of the 17th century. Including forty different stories, the collection is titled ‘Stories to Caution the World’ and the White Snake tale ‘Madam White Imprisoned under the Thunder Peak Tower’ (some editions also translate the novella as ‘Eternal Prisoner under the Thunder Peak Tower’ or simply ‘The White Snake’).

[…]

…The emphasis, however, is shifted to her devotion to Xu, as well as her sympathy towards humankind. The once righteous Fahai, now entering the scene as a troublemaker who simply cannot just mind his own business, tricks her into revealing her true form to Xu.

The full story is at Medievalists.

The Day After.

It’s the day after pain clinic, and I have the best pain people ever, they take great care of me, and it’s always nice to see them, tell stories, and catch up. For all that the visits are good, the days after aren’t so grand. I’m having trouble sitting, and I hate taking pain meds so early in the morning, so I’m going to wander off and have a very quiet day not sitting. I’ve reached the ‘Spirits of Malice’ section of The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, by Scott G. Bruce, where monks have given in to writing more salacious accounts of the undead, so that will keep me occupied.

I’ll leave you with a forensic account of someone who was in considerable pain prior to a vicious killing blow, a young Danish Medieval Warrior. A summary is at Medievalists, the full paper is available from Scholars Portal. I’ll see you all tomorrow. I think.

Guess Me.

Guess Me, a curious collection of enigmas, charades, acting charades, double acrostics, conundrums, verbal puzzles, hieroglyphics, anagrams, etc. Compiled and arranged by Frederick D’Arros Planché; 1879; Pott, Young and co. in New York.

Illustrated by George Cruikshank among others, this example of good old-fashioned and wholesome entertainment offers a collection of enigmas, conundrums, acrostics, “decapitations”, and a series of incredibly tricky rebuses. The preface explains that an enigma can have many solutions whereas a conundrum only has one, and that “The essence of a good conundrum is to be found in its answer, which should be itself something of a pun, a puzzle, or an epigram, an inversion of the regular and ordinary meaning of the word.”

There are 631 conundrums:

A sample, click for full size:

Oh, these are awful, and quite wonderful, well, some of them. There’s quite a bit of casual racism and misogyny to be found, too. Via The Public Domain, or you can just click right over to the book.

Challenging Oxford: World’s Oldest Zero.

Bakhshali manuscript – image courtesy Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; Science Museum.

An international group of historians of Indian mathematics challenges Oxford’s findings around the age and importance of a manuscript thought to contain the oldest known zero.

Last month, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University announced that a Sanskrit manuscript housed in the library for the last century had been dated using radiocarbon techniques. Oxford’s radiocarbon dating laboratory announced that the three of the birch-bark folios of the Bakhshali Manuscript could be dated to roughly 300 CE, 700 CE and 900 CE.

[…]

An international group of historians of Indian mathematics has now challenged Oxford’s findings.

The team, which includes scholars from universities in the USA, France, Japan, New Zealand and the University of Alberta in Canada, has published a peer-reviewed article that refutes several of the Library’s key assertions.

[…]

The international team ends its article with a plea to Oxford University’s Library that important and complex scholarly topics should be published through established academic channels involving peer-review, and not through sensationalizing press releases to the media.

Medievalists has the full story. Also see The First Zero. The article in the journal History of Science in South Asia.

Faust 1.

Title page and opening pages of Faust, by Harry Clarke. Note the beautiful self-portrait in the last image (Clarke as Faust, figure on the right). One thing that’s fun to do with all of the illustrations is to count all the eyes. Many, lots! :D There are some noted phalluses, too, but those are a bit later on.

Intro to Faust.

The Trouvelot astronomical images end today, and tomorrow, we’ll start with Harry Clarke, a prolific and incredibly talented stained glass artist and illustrator. Clarke died very young, age 41, but left an amazing amount of work, and most of the books he illustrated are still in print today. Clarke had a habit of incorporating self-portraits into most all of his work, including his stained glass work:

Left: Photograph of Clarke in the posture of crucifixion. Right: Detail, Crucifixion (1920).

All of Clarke’s illustrations are amazingly beautiful, even when they depict the macabre. In 1914, a decade before he would illustrate Goethe’s Faust, Clarke depicted himself as an absinthe drinking Mephistopheles:

Mephisto (1914), Clarke’s self-portrait as an absinthe drinking Mephistopheles.

Clarke’s The Last Hour of the Night (1922), the frontispiece for Dublin of the Future, the prize-winning design for an urban planning competition staged in 1914 (but not published until 1922 because of the intervening violence and devastation).

It took me a while to decide on doing Clarke’s illustrations, simply because it would make for a very long series, but they are all exquisite. So, we’ll start with Faust, then move on to the illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, then on to Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. We’ll be traveling with Harry Clarke for a bit over three months.

Most of the posts will have more than one image – opening pages will be together, as will decoratives, and beginning and chapter ends.