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May. 16th, 2024 04:30 pm
I Should Post More Often
I don’t know if anyone but me would be interested in this, but — Timothy Snyder (history professor at Yale, author of On Tyranny) gave a talk called “Wonder Woman and the Orcs: Ukrainian History and Western Fables.” He starts by saying that Ukrainians call Russian soldiers orcs, and he points out that J.R.R Tolkien got the word orc from Beowulf and Scandinavian Eddas, and that because Kyiv was settled by Scandinavians, Ukrainians would have used the same word a thousand years ago. It was fun hearing Snyder talk about The Lord of the Rings, a subject I know something about, as opposed to the Habsburg dynasty or the Mongolian conquest of Russia. And unlike some he has a good understanding of Tolkien, though it’s not his field.
As for Wonder Woman, he talked about the genesis of the comic book and the radical ideas of the two women and one man who invented her. Then he went back more than two thousand years to the Scythians, and the discovery that about a third of their soldiers were women. Of course people had at first refused to believe that women could be soldiers, and when their graves were excavated archeologists claimed that the bodies, buried along with their horses and swords, were of men, though smaller men with strangely configured pelvises. Finally their DNA was tested, and the disbelievers had to give in. The Scythians lived in what is modern Ukraine, and Ukraine, unlike Russia, has women soldiers.
At first I wasn’t sure what Snyder was getting at with all this, though I didn’t think it was that the word orc had survived in the collective unconscious of Ukraine for a thousand years. But it was nothing more, and nothing less, than the fact that we’re all connected, that a Scandinavian saga takes place in what is now modern Ukraine and that female Scythian soldiers used a lasso similar to Wonder Woman’s. At the end Snyder says, “It’s not so crazy to think that, even if it will all come to an end some day, you should still destroy the ring.”
——
This is from a “Chocolate and Bookstore Crawl” — everything I love fitted neatly on one sign. Okay, there could be a few more things on there, but that would be crowding it.
The Crawl was put on by Charlie Jane Anders, and was, um, a month and a half ago. Yeah, I should post more often.
Edited to add: Snyder's talk is here.
As for Wonder Woman, he talked about the genesis of the comic book and the radical ideas of the two women and one man who invented her. Then he went back more than two thousand years to the Scythians, and the discovery that about a third of their soldiers were women. Of course people had at first refused to believe that women could be soldiers, and when their graves were excavated archeologists claimed that the bodies, buried along with their horses and swords, were of men, though smaller men with strangely configured pelvises. Finally their DNA was tested, and the disbelievers had to give in. The Scythians lived in what is modern Ukraine, and Ukraine, unlike Russia, has women soldiers.
At first I wasn’t sure what Snyder was getting at with all this, though I didn’t think it was that the word orc had survived in the collective unconscious of Ukraine for a thousand years. But it was nothing more, and nothing less, than the fact that we’re all connected, that a Scandinavian saga takes place in what is now modern Ukraine and that female Scythian soldiers used a lasso similar to Wonder Woman’s. At the end Snyder says, “It’s not so crazy to think that, even if it will all come to an end some day, you should still destroy the ring.”
——
This is from a “Chocolate and Bookstore Crawl” — everything I love fitted neatly on one sign. Okay, there could be a few more things on there, but that would be crowding it.
The Crawl was put on by Charlie Jane Anders, and was, um, a month and a half ago. Yeah, I should post more often.
Edited to add: Snyder's talk is here.
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