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2002-02-26 - 11:57 a.m.
Deep thoughts
Deep thoughts---------- - OK, I don't know how deep they are but they are different from the things I usually think about. Periodically over the years, I become fascinated with other cultures and get obsessive about investigating them. Norah Lofts wrote whole series of books about different periods in England that were intriguingly detailed. Her non-fiction book about life in medieval England was one I checked out every few years from the library until they lost it. Last week at the library I came across another of the same genre, but a little more intellectual (I skip the parts that get too so) It has the longest title that I have ever came across and is very thought-provoking. 'The Year 1000, What life was like at the turn of the first millenium, An Englishman's World.' The 2 fellows that wrote it are journalists with access to many many English historians. Their observations and conclusions are so different from most of the historians I have read that I am doing some thinking about life then. Many times we western Americans look askance about the British, considering them to be effete, pretentious and altogether too stuffy for us. Or else we go the other way and become enamoured with tea and country gardens. I realize as I read this book, we are the descendants in every way of England, even as I acknowledge the melting pot America is. We may even be truer descendants than the English of today are. I have been told that we today are much bigger than folk of the past. Not so, according to this book. We are larger that those of the 1400's and on but it has taken us all these centuries to catch up with what were very common measurements of the 1000 Englishman. Those of that time were amazing people. They worked hard, and in doing so produced food in a plenty that changed their land and produced our civilization. They gave us a language that exists today changed very little. A language based very much in Anglo-Saxon and Norse roots that were surprisingly alike. Winston Churchill's great fighting speech came from the Old English used in 1000 except for one word, 'surrender' which had a French past. "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Neil Armstrong's "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Words that were in use in 1000. The writers also noted that the dirty words we often refer to as Anglo-Saxon and which I will not write here, did not come from that source but words brought from Holland and Europe in the Middle ages. The things I am reading here in this book are expanding my thinking in so many areas. None of them have anything to do with spiritual issues and ponderings, except to make me marvel at the diversity of Your creation. The other thing I have done this weekend is watch Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. It has me scrambling for a Cliff's Notes version on the internet, lazy creature that I am. All the dialogue is directly from the origial Shakespeare, and unless it is different from Branagh's versions of 'Much Ado About Nothing' and 'Henry IV' (or whatever Roman numeral it was)it has all the dialogue. Shakespeare made the people of this play Danes, and I am wondering if something from the book 1000 was still true in Shakespeare's time. Denmark of today seems to be a country of small consequence, but according to 1000, most Englishmen of that time referred to the Norse as Danes. As the supposed origins of the pillagers and berserkers that swept down upon England periodcally, the Danes would hve been prominent,indeed. Must look into this some more.
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