He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. Rest in peace, little ones and the heroes who gave their lives to protect you.
And for the first time, the baby, whether boy or girl, will be the Heir Apparent, the next in line after Charles and Wills! And so the United Kingdom joins Sweden, Norway and four other European monarchies in overturning male-preference primogeniture. Cool Britannia!
Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden says 'BOUT TIME, GUISE.
Primogeniture of course is the idea that the succession is determined by birth order--with male primogeniture, brothers automatically supplant their sisters, and subsequent children supplant their aunts and uncles. It can be HELLISHLY confusing to figure out the line of succession, so here are the current standings :
1) Charles, Prince of Wales (b. 1948)
followed by his children...
2) Prince William, Duke of Cambridge
3) Prince Harry of Wales
and then followed by Charles's next brother...
4) Prince Andrew, Duke of York (b. 1960)
5) Princess Beatrice of York
6) Princess Eugenie of York
followed by the youngest brother...
7) Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex (b. 1964)
8) James, Viscount Severn
9) Lady Louise Windsor
and finally Anne and her two children bring up the rear...
10) Anne, The Princess Royal (b. 1950)
11) Peter Phillips
12) Zara Phillips
BOLD = Children of Queen Elizabeth. Note how Anne is last after her brothers and their children, even though she is the second oldest [and most badass] of her generation.
If we want to go beyond this--that is, beyond the children and grandchildren of the current Queen, we would then follow her younger sister's line, that of Princess Margaret. Even though she is dead, her two children's [and their children's] places in the line of succession remain. This system can be followed indefinitely--once you've exhausted the current generational crop, you just go back a generation [in this case, to that of Elizabeth and Margaret's father] and start following the descendants of all those siblings. Which explains how back in 1727 when Queen Anne died with no immediate suitable [i.e., Protestant] heir**, they finally tracked down the next candidate, an elderly German who didn't speak any English, and dragged him from Hanover to London to slap the crown on his head. YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE.
It is fascinating to remember that for all magnitude of Elizabeth's reign [and she is very close to surpassing Victoria's record as the longest-reigning British monarch]...
...she almost certainly never would've been Queen had she had even one brother. Once Elizabeth's father, King George VI, ascended the throne, Elizabeth was the next in line, the heir--but since she was a girl, she was the Heiress Presumptive who might still be replaced. Other Heir Presumptives include the current Prince Harry, who is currently next in line after Wills--but only until next summer when Wills becomes a father. [At which point Harry will be heard cackling with relief and ordering rounds of shots and strippers...In other words, a typical Saturday night!]
...there is a comfortingly historical familiarity to the Eleanors, Matildas and Isabellas that dot the lists. And our new prince or princess will have an especially small and traditional pool of allowable monikers***--for a girl, look for first names like Mary, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Victoria, Alexandra, Catherine [I am personally pulling for Alice or Margaret]. Diana, for obvious reasons, is a possible middle name. For a boy, Edward, George, Frederick and Albert are possibilities. [Arthur and John, however, are considered bad luck within the royal family--they can be middle names but not first.]
So congratulations on your Blessed Event, Kate and William! Take it easy girl, get off your feet, and don't be afraid to have that glass of wine every now and then. Oh, and when's the baby shower again? My invitation seems to have been lost in the mail...
*Technically the only Heir Apparent right now is Charles--I'm using the term rather casually for the purposes of explicating the rules of succession. Once Charles ascends to the throne, William becomes the next Heir Apparent, and so on.
**In fact poor Anne had no living direct descendants at all when she died--she suffered through 17 pregnancies, and every one of them miscarried or died young.
***Princess Anne was allowed to get away with naming her daughter Zara because she's so far down in the line of succession. And also because she's, well, Anne.
As always, fervent apologies for my slackness in updating--I've been busy since early June directing two back-to-back musicals and am now recuperating! With that I'll wade right into today's topic:
Man v. [Mother] Nature
The Empire State has had some rare visitors in the last year--a couple of genuine, honest-to-God hurricanes. We get plenty of wet weather [and how!] but hurricanes are a relative novelty. Even Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm, a massive weather system that spanned the Outer Banks of North Carolina to the Grand Banks off of Nova Scotia [where the Andrea Gail went down]
and which hit Massachusetts very hard indeed, was mostly a mésalliance between an unnamed tropical cyclone, a good ol’ fashioned nor’easter, and the remnants of Hurricane Grace.
The reason hurricanes are rare in the northeast is because tropical storm systems, which generally start to form off the northwestern coast of Africa in the late summer months, derive their energy from one essential element—warm water. New York and New England are far enough north that usually by the time a storm has traveled all the way up here over several days, it has started to cool down and hence lose its cohesion and so, unlike the Atlantic South and the Gulf Coast, the New York area is generally protected.
However there was one notorious exception 1938, a September storm that devastated Long Island and Points North (in fact it is still New England’s most destructive, deadly storm). This was before the United States Weather Bureau had started trying out official naming systems, and so the 1938 storm had a plethora of sobriquets, including:
the Great New England Hurricane
the Yankee Clipper [gotta wonder how Joltin' Joe felt about that one!]
I first became interested in this bit of meteorological history when I came across a child’s book of famous storms—according to the book, this hurricane got its locomotive nickname because of its incredible speed. Hurricanes have two kinds of speed metrics--wind speed within the storm, and how fast they actually move across the land. Most hurricanes travel relatively slowly, around 15-20 miles per hour. The Long Island Express, in contrast, moved at a whopping 70 miles an hour, zooming up the length of the Atlantic coast, from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina to New York in six hours. When it finally made landfall, it slammed into the coast so hard, seismographs on the other side of the country picked it up. In other words, it literally shook the continent.
Needless to say, in those ancient days before radar and when meteorology was in its infancy, Long Islanders had no way to expect this monster. One famous story about the Express tells us of a man who received in the mail that morning a barometer that he'd ordered. But upon opening the package he was annoyed--his new device was apparently already broken, as it was a clear beautiful day out and yet the reading seemed to be stuck on the lowest level: Hurricane.
The Express also ripped the coastline asunder, its fury shaping a permanent reminder in Shinnecock Inlet, which was carved into the barrier island south of Long Island as the storm tore through.
New York City started on an island and is surrounded by rivers, tides, bridges and seawalls--and yet for most of our history we’ve been able to take that uneasy relationship with Mother Nature for granted. Denizens of the Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, Florida could have told us--ignore the power of the planet at your peril. All very well for King Lear to shake his fist at the skies: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout... …but the white cliffs of Dover didn’t really have to worry about storm surge. PSA: Occupy Sandy is a boots-on-the-ground organization that is helping areas in the New York City area that have been devastated by Hurricane Sandy, including Red Hook, the Rockaways and Coney Island. Please consider volunteering with them--if you can't offer your elbow grease, you can help by donating through their gift registry on Amazon. Every generator, every blanket, every flashlight helps--let's rebuild our wonderful city!
We’re in the middle of the Stanley Cup finals right now, and the Devils* are playing so the NYC subway is plastered with posters advertising the series. I see this one in particular a lot:
The engravings caught my eye so I looked at some other pictures of the Cup and saw date and names etched into the top of the Cup. Shamrocks of Montreal 1899…Wanderers defeated Kinora 12 to 8…Boston Bruins…Pittsburgh Penguins…
And it dawned on me—the Stanley Cup isn’t just a metaphor for a title [that is, the Super Bowl is the name for the NFL championship game, not a literal bowl], it’s an actual physical trophy that is passed along from winner to winner, with the names of all the previous champions etched into it—all the way back to 1893. In other words, it’s a genuine artifact! Like...the Stone of Scone, Henry VIII’s billets doux to Anne Boleyn**, the pillow on which Lincoln’s head rested after Ford’s Theater*** or even...
...the Hockey Grail?
A championship title is an honor no matter what, but there is something especially powerful about laying your hands on the actual thing, the relic that has been touched and cradled and kissed by so many others through the years. Touch is a powerful experience [wherefore this clever marketing campaign for the NHLNetwork, inviting fans to "hold" the Cup]—this is why so many relics are believed to have miraculous powers. Imagine having just won the NHL title, and finally laying hands on this shining beautiful thing which so many champions before you have touched. Your name listed there next to your teammates’, a testament to this incredible accomplishment you all share, handed down from winner to winner, through the ages.
As trophies go, a Super Bowl ring is undoubtedly [albeit blingily] impressive,
but you really can't beat the Cup’s elegant simplicity and being included on the roster of champions. Even if you don't get to keep it forever.
*As far as I know, New Jersey is the only state with its very own fantastic beast! The Devil has been lurking in the Pine Barrens since 1735, presumably quite pleased with itself for having its own NHL team.
**If you can believe it, these letters are actually in the Vatican Archives and hello, they really should give them back! Why would you guys want a constant reminder of The One Who Got Away? On the other hand, I imagine the Vatican is giving the Crown a stern look and saying "We'll give Henry's letters back when you guys return Defender of the Faith!"
***Which I’ve seen—it’s on display at the Peterson House and has never been washed since that night. Very visceral stuff, although the blood has faded quite a bit.
Last week was the anniversary of the Kent State massacre.
The division of history into distinct decades is somewhat arbitrary—the ‘80s, for example, spilled over into the early ‘90s because the Reagan-Bush era ended in '92. The ‘60s as we think of them—turbulent, vivid, urgent and dangerous—didn’t really kick off until late ’63, after the Kennedy assassination and right around the time the Beatles arrived in the States.* And when did the ‘60s end? Four days in May, on a grassy campus in northeast Ohio, when activists at Kent State, angered by Nixon's escalation of the war into Cambodia on April 30, set off a weekend of protest that ended when the Ohio State Guard shot into a crowd of unarmed students, the culmination of what Todd Gitlin called “The Days of Death.” May 4 1970 was when the war came home.
I was only vaguely aware of the shootings until in college** I stumbled across James Michener’s book Kent State: What Happened and Why—probably the first volume on the topic, it was written and published in early 1971.
Michener’s text is absolutely fascinating, and very, very contemporary, so much so that he assumes knowledge of then-current terms, like "straight" and "drop out" and "outside agitators," which have since become dated. One phrase, one reference in particular stood out--Michener and the students constantly talked about "the revolution." Not a, but the.
I wasn’t sure what this meant but my mother set me straight—she explained to me that in those strange days, people believed that a by-God REVOLUTION was imminent, that all the rhetoric and violence was all leading toward a forcible overthrow of “the system.” I responded “Oh, like Helter Skelter” [Manson’s term for the race war he was trying to ignite with the murders he ordered—he picked up the phrase from the Beatles’ White Album, released the previous year. Needless to say, the White Album does not endorse murder]. As a child of the post-‘60s, the mindset is a little difficult to grasp at first—the US really did undergo a revolution but it was more metaphorical than literal, an open challenge to the system of white patriarchal privilege rather than a literal coup d'etat.
Michener’s text is dated in another way—without exception, every female student is described in such glowing terms as “a leggy blonde co-ed” or “one of the prettiest of the activists." It reads as though Austin Powers were the ghost writer! Perhaps the most sadly hilarious example is during an interview with a black student, one Cindy Sudberry.
It was pathetic for a black like me to watch the nice white boys and girls growing up so fast. "Are the guns loaded? Are they using real bullets?"...You didn't hear any blacks asking damn-fool questions like that...And I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying "I knew when I was born. The guns are always loaded."
Cindy's rueful take on the shootings would have more impact if Michener hadn't introduced her with a long, lingering description of her "superb figure" in its "open midriff dress" and a detailed rundown of her cosmetic regime. ["A touch of rouge and eye makeup" and an "intelligent" use of lipstick, for the record.] Down, boy.
As I read the book, I kept coming back to that famous picture, the one that won the Pulitzer, the one snapped right after the shooting had stopped and a 14 year old runaway was screaming over Jeffrey Glenn Miller, who’d been shot in the head.
If you examine the photo, you can see the many of the students nearby don’t realize yet what has happened—several of them are clearly still on their way to class, unconcerned with what must have seemed like just another protest on a sunny spring day. Like Michener’s text, the picture is caught in time—everything has started to change, the deluge is just outside the frame of the shot, about to overwhelm everyone. The girl’s body language is so anguished, so fraught; she is an hieroglyph of shock and horror. When you look more closely you can see what must have been obvious to her—that she is standing over, and perhaps in, a river of Miller’s blood.***
I used to listen to the musical Godspell [which premiered off-Broadway a year after Kent State] as I was reading the book—the ballad “On the Willows,” with its mournful, delicate guitar riffs and that sliding cadence from major to minor on the last phrase, seemed especially appropriate.
But how can we sing
Sing the Lord’s song
In a foreign land?
As I pored over the grainy pictures in the book, I kept imagining that song playing over the sounds of the shooting, the cries, the agonized breathing as Alison Krause and William Schroeder and Sandy Scheuer fought to stay alive [JeffreyMiller of course died immediately].
For our captors there required Of us, songs And our tormentors, mirth...
Little enough grace to ease their passing. In the aftermath of the shootings traditionalist Americans who were frustrated by the student movements of the ‘60s rose up in condemnation against the four dead students. Rarely has the generational divide been so starkly revealed. Many older Americans said things like "those kids got what was coming to them" and "students get away with too much today [sound familiar?] and they should be shot" and most shockingly "Any student who was on campus that day should have been shot down." One mother heartbreakingly told her daughter, an honors student and an RA who had barely missed being shot, that if a bullet had found her "you would have deserved it."
William Schroeder was an ROTC cadet, a "straight." Sandy Scheuer was on her way to class. They were not protesting--but even if they had been, like Allison Krause and Jeff Miller, these are First Amendment rights. They are constitutionally protected. If this country can tolerate neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, we can tolerate a few long-haired students flipping off armed Guardsmen.
Even in the face of parental alienation and the hatred of conservatives and even death, the students wouldn't back down--there were campus strikes all over the nation in protest to the shootings [760 according to Michener]. I rather love this NYU student's bravado:
But in the end, perhaps the students did win--as I've argued before, nothing galvanizes a movement like excessive force and it seems that eventually parental love won out over politics. The war that Nixon escalated, the war for which he won re-election by promising a "secret plan" to end, the unpopular, endless quagmire for which students were dying in droves, both in Vietnam and now on their own campuses, finally, finally, crept to a halt five years later--poetically on April 30, 1975.
*I read a fascinating theory speculating that the reception to the Beatles was so ecstatic in part because of the Kennedy assassination—that after six weeks of sustained national mourning, the nation seized the opportunity to forget their grief for a while.
**I discovered this book carelessly tucked away in one of the student lounges at my alma mater, Sweet Briar. For some reason this lounge was full of hidden historical treasures—I also came across a copy of James Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society here. Fantastic! Like Kent State: What Happened and Why, Silver’s book is another examination of a campus uprising (the violent resistance to the integration of Ole Miss in 1962), and was written during the last fall of the Kennedy administration—but it was published in early 1964 and so it was dated as soon as it came out. Things had a way of changing very quickly in the ‘60s—the center wasn’t holding.Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer/Things fall apart...
***If you want to see Miller's body at another angle to appreciate exactly how horrific his shooting was, you can search for the pictures on Google images. Warning: They are very graphic, why is why I didn't host them. Head wounds bleed quite heavily--according to Michener "No one, not even veterans from Vietnam, could believe that so much blood had come from one human being."
The RMS Titanic, that spectacular metaphor for nature’s ultimate rebuke to mankind and, along with World War I, the death of the rigid class system of the Edwardian era. Or, as The Onion puts it more succinctly:
Titanic’s hold on our imagination is undeniable and only seems to get stronger as time passes—in one year (1996-1997) no fewer than three major adaptations of the story came out!
Maury Yeston's Broadway musical Titanic (the very first Broadway musical I ever saw!)
I first became interested in the disaster when, as a child, I read Richard Peck’s modern juvenile classic Ghosts I Have Been, a crucial plot point of which involves a heart-breaking (albeit fictional) incident wherein a young English boy’s parents have abandoned their son in his cabin to save themselves. Peck even has the father, Sir Poindexter, claim a spot in the lifeboats by dressing as a woman, in a clear reference to this Titanic legend. The book's eerie refrain of "iron against ice” and the tender moment between young Julian and the main character Blossom, summoned from the near-future to bear witness and comfort the boy, stayed with me.
And Peck’s scenario is not impossible--one child in First Class was known to have died on the Titanic. Sadly the children in steerage died in droves.
I’ve written before about the special horror of dying in cold water—but Titanic's passengers had a somewhat different experience than those on Flight 90. They had time to prepare for their deaths--time to deny, to rationalize, to fear, to fight it, to come to grips, to greet it with dignity. Time to say goodbye, or to make a choice, as the Strausses did, to embrace death together. "Where you go, I go." And one more poetic, heart-breaking difference--they died at night, far from home, and most of their bodies were not recovered.
A few years after reading Ghosts I Have Been, I came across another book, this treasure, written by 2 experts who were used as consultants on the ’97 film. LOVE this volume—lots of photographs, marvelously detailed illustrations and, fascinatingly, a picture taken the next day of what may have been the actual iceberg that struck the ship.
Yes, that mark on the right is said to have been from the ship. Great article here looks at the evidence.
As for that iceberg—why exactly did the great ship hit? The major human factor was hubris—the owner, J. Bruce Ismay, wanted publicity for the maiden crossing, and so pushed the captain to go faster. Even so this likely would not have been a problem had the weather conditions been slightly different. The musical's Act One finale sums it up neatly in one verse, as the lookout sings: "No Moon" from Maury Yeston's Titanic
No moon, no wind
No light to spy things by
No wave, no swell
No line where sea meets sky
Stillness, darkness
Can't see a thing, says I
No reflection
Not a shadow
Not a glint of light
Meets the eye...
And we go sailing
Sailing
Ever westward on the sea…
No moonlight to see the 'bergs. And no wind, which would make the water break against the ice. They were flying blind, going at a breakneck pace [westward of course, which = death in Freudian symbolism] with no radar and almost no visibility, only their faith in the invincibility of Titanic’s design, in steel and ingenuity, in man's manifest supremacy over nature, to protect them.
There’s actually some disagreement on the band’s final song—originally some passengers remembered it as “Nearer, My God, to Thee” but Harold Bride recalled hearing “Autumn” across the water. But was it the Episcopalian hymn or the French tune, "Songe d'Autumne"? The musical takes this idea and runs with it—they composed a new song:
Autumn
Shall we all meet in the Autumn?
Golden and glowing by Autumn
Shall we still be best of friends?
Best of friends...
Whose melody is also heard in the background later in the second act, during the final scramble to the lifeboats.
I’m not crazy about Cameron’s film* although I enjoy a great deal of it (and parts of it are genuinely glorious). But one of my favorite moments is when the musicians, having been released from their duties, wordlessly regroup for one last time for “Nearer, My God, to Thee”—the violin sending out those sweet, familiar strains, comforting those about to die, bestowing a patina of grace over the panicked rush to survive at all costs, calling out to the lucky few in the boats Remember us.
Remember us.
These men were heroes—they gave their lives to help keep the passengers calm during the evacuation. Not one of them survived.
I have an affinity for those musicians, since I (and, interestingly, my grandfather) also served on board a liner as a musician—in my case it was a cruise ship in and around the western Mediterranean. [Not much problem with icebergs there, although there were earthquakes in the east to worry about--thanks, Poseidon Adventure!]. Titanic certainly had made its mark on the industry—apparently bookings went way up after the movie came out! The design of the liner on which I served, the R2 of Renaissance Cruise Lines (a victim of the post-9/11 travel recession), was even inspired by the great ship:
Titanic's famous stairway.
The former R2, now the Regatta--yep, your favorite historian/singer/dancer used to traipse up and down these stairs! I have a picture of the Entertainment Department somewhere which I'll upload soon...
I am finishing this up at exactly 2:20 am, when the great ship finally went under the waters.
Listen to their voices across the sea.
Remember us. *For someone who clearly cares so much about the great ship, you’d think Cameron** would try a little harder for historical accuracy—the women of Lifeboat 6 most certainly DID want to go back to save their husbands, and were threatened by the clearly terrified Quartermaster Hichens. In fact his nastiness in the lifeboat got so bad that eventually Molly Brown threatened to throw him overboard. Gotta love a (post-) Edwardian woman kickin’ ass and takin’ names.
**However I love that Cameron threw in a small reference to Chief Baker Joughin, the tippling crew member whose gin-soaked bloodstream was able, somehow, to keep him warm enough to survive TWO HOURS in the 28-degree water! The. Hell?! Most people in that water died within minutes! WASP blood chemistry, I tell you.
I have become addicted to the TV show Game of Thrones. I watched the premiere episode last spring and it didn’t quite grab me—but then someone told me that the source material (George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire) is actually based on the Wars of the Roses and I was All. Over. That!
So, some references are fairly obvious: Stark = York, Lannister = Lancaster. Westeros is essentially all of Europe, although more England than anything. The Wall is Hadrian's Wall; the wildlings are probably the aboriginal Britons, the Celts who were driven out by the Roman troops. The southern kingdoms seem to be sort of Aquitaine-ish, with all the flowers and sultry living.
Physically Westeros looks more like Scotland than England. I wonder if that makes the Dothraki Irish!
Part of the fun of watching something like this is figuring out who is based on whom—and then examining how Martin upends those prototypes, or combines them with others. King Robert is clearly intended to be your basic Edward IV-type:
heavy-set*
drinks a lot
whores around
strong warrior who led a rebellion and supplanted a Mad King.
[And let me say, I called Robert’s death a loooong time ago, I had a feeling something dreadfully William Rufus-ish would happen to him. Know your fairy tales and STAY OUT of the Forbidden Forest!]
However. Edward was a MUCH better king than Robert and his marriage to his eventual queen was certainly not the cold political alliance of Cersei and Robert. In fact Edward lost significant political support when he married Elizabeth Woodville [thoroughly pissing off his main backer, Warwick the Kingmaker, who ended up leading another rebellion AGAINST Edward and reinstating the previous King, Henry VI. The Wars of the Roses can be hellishly confusing—the timeline reads like a litany: …Henry VI, Edward IV, Henry VI, Edward IV…].
Poor Henry is the clearest parallel for Aerys the Mad King, but Henry’s insanity was pretty harmless stuff, mainly a lot of praying and swaying—he certainly wasn’t burning anyone alive! [Henry did have an unfortunate habit of wandering off during important battles though…after the 2nd Battle of St. Albans they found him sitting under a tree singing.]
Sorry blokes, d’you need me for something? Wot, I'm KING, how'd that happen?
So this seems to make Cersei the counterpart for Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s gorgeous, cold consort—but in her cool, straightforward bids for power, Cersei actually strikes me as more of a Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s Queen. Margaret, a fierce HBIC, led ARMIES, for God’s sake—there’s an hilariously disapproving account of her in Edward Hall’s Chronicles, courtesy of Richard Duke of York, frosty with frustrated battlefield chauvinism.
Gah! How tackily unfeminine!
The Duke of York barely lived to regret his sneering words as Margaret's army promptly handed his ass to him in the Battle of Wakefield the next day, wiping out the Yorkists. Ol' Richard's head ended up decorating a gate outside his eponymous city, adorned with a paper crown saying "Let York overlook the town of York. "Oooh, that is COLD, Margaret!
Margaret had just one child, one precious son, Edward of Lancaster, the Prince of Wales, of whose birthright she was extremely protective.
Mummy, how come everyone says I look so much like Uncle Jaime the Duke of Somerset?
Like Cersei’s Joffrey [and Paul I, Catherine the Great’s only child who almost certainly was not fathered by her husband, the previous Tsar], Edward's paternity was questioned (delicately)—poor crazy, singing Henry didn’t really seem up to the task! Perhaps due to his somewhat unsettled childhood and his mother’s weird habit of consulting her son on how to execute prisoners, Edward was disturbingly precocious in his zest for York blood. One foreign observer said the boy
already talks of nothing but cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle or the peaceful occupant of that throne.
Edward would have been right at home in King's Landing!
But who is the Prince's analogue? In Game of Thrones, there are several candidates:
That psychopath Joffrey, obviously. Although Edward was never THAT sadistic; frankly Joffrey seems more like Caligula!
Robin, the bloodthirsty heir of Eyrie, who likes to see prisoners “fly!”--out the window and down a 1000-foot drop. However as attached as Edward might have been to his formidable mother, he did NOT breastfeed to the age of 8. [My eyes!]
Vicerys, the pretender to the Iron Throne, who like Edward maintained a court in exile after fleeing his homeland as a child.
As for all the incest? I got nothing. The Lancasters and the Yorks didn't really keep it in the family a la the Ptolemys--the one possible exception is the rumor that Richard III was seeking to marry his niece Elizabeth of York after his first wife died. The English didn't really go for that sort of tackiness, though. The Habsburgs, however...**
*Henry VIII, Edward’s grandson, strongly resembled Edward, both physically and in personality. Both were stunning physical specimens in youth—tall, fair, athletic—with significant weight gain in later life; both were charming but absolutely draconian when they had to be.
**I have been meaning to do an entry on the most notorious member of that unbelievably inbred family, Carlos el Hechizado--the Bewitched. He was his own cousin MANY times over and the results weren't pretty.
This past Christmas, while visiting the Washington DC area, I was blessed with an embarrassment of riches, a medieval two-fer. The first was like something out of a Tolkien dream, a priceless hoard of precious metals and ornaments from the Dark Ages, found lying beneath the earth; the second, a long-lost text from the 10th century whose story reads like a Gaston Leroux novel by way of Dan Brown.
Part I Sic transit gloria Angli...
In July of 2009 [coincidentally right before I visited London for my first extended visit], an enormous hoard of gold and silver was dug up in Staffordshire, England. As it turned out the treasure dated back to the Anglo-Saxon era—a Sutton Hoo for the new millennium! I was dying to view the loot when I was actually over there, but the experts were still cleaning it up and had not put it on public display yet—I had to wait until the Brits brought it over here, to be exhibited at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC.
Thankfully they were open on Christmas Eve, since that was the only day I could go! Walking into the exhibit hall was like entering Smaug's cavern. I couldn't stop staring at these pieces. They were breathtaking—incredibly detailed, dazzling and golden and captivating. And mysterious. Who buried this collection and when? And why? Who was the man who displayed these pommel atop his sword, the warrior who had first worn that helmet plate, what do we know about their violent, cold, vivid world?
The Anglo-Saxons predated what we think of as England*--they were only two of a number of Germanic tribes that surged into the power vacuum that was the British isles after Shit Started Getting Real in the Roman Empire in the early 400s and onward [when the Romans pulled out of Britain because their empire was busy falling apart. You know how it is]. Everyone knows the date 1066, when William the Conqueror [or the Bastard, if you prefer--he answered to both names] won the Battle of Hastings**...but there was nearly 700 hundred years between the pullout of the Romans, and the appearance of the Normans [who were really Vikings just a few generations removed***]. What happened in the intervening years?
Well, an awful lot of fighting, mainly. The Germanic tribes--the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Frisians, all swept across the North Sea like a cold wind, all part of what the Germans call the Völkerwanderung, the Migration of Peoples, a long, long period from the 400s AD to roughly 900 or so, when seemingly every people in Europe was infected with restlessness and had to move, to go, to invade, to conquer.
Two of these tribe (the Visigoths and the Vandals) sacked Rome--in the same century! Before that Rome hadn't been sacked for 800 years but by the 5th century, things had deteriorated so badly in the Empire that a horde of illiterate long-haired tribesmen was able to bring down the Caput Mundi.
What were they seeking? What were they trying to accomplish? What caused so many kind of peoples, so many tribes and clans and kindred to pick up and move across the landmasses of Europe?
No one really knows.
Which brings us back to this glittering, alluring pile of gold, the perfect fancy for these turbulent, hungry times. As vast as the hoard was [the largest EVER from the Anglo-Saxon period!], it offered only a few, tantalizing clues as to its origins. For one thing almost all the objects were military in purpose--no coins, no combs or belts or jewelry, just things like hilt collars, scabbards, helmet plates. For another--most intriguingly--almost none of the pieces were intact; many of them were deliciously mangled and even torn.
"The Folded Cross." This may have been held aloft into battle, as religious artifacts often were.
and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian,
at the gold beyond price and count.
Like Bilbo, I too was dazzled, my heart was caught by these lovely, delicate, intricately worked objects, precious pieces over which some anonymous, long-dead artisan had worked, imagining his hands twisting the thin strands onto the plates, shaping and polishing the garnets, creating a thing of beauty to last the ages.
A hilt collar--this would have decorated a sword handle.
Imagining some fierce Danish or Welsh fighter grappling with an enemy, their swords clashing and rending the gorgeous metalwork.
Notice the eagle's head on the left, and the scales on the other end. The Anglo-Saxons loved visual jokes and puns such as this.
Imagining too how these riches ended up sleeping beneath the earth for over 1ooo years...Perhaps some enterprising Mercian warrior, lucky enough to be on the winning side [the typical Anglo-Saxon practice was for all the losers to be slaughtered], crept out under cover of darkness to strip the bodies and hurriedly buried his stash, hoping to retrieve it later.
'Round the roof of the helmet a head-guarder outside
Braided with wires, with bosses was furnished,
That swords-for-the-battle fight-hardened might fail
Boldly to harm him...
Perhaps the gold was buried in tribute--to an enemy, to a god, perhaps in thanksgiving to a battle won...
No one knows.
*Although they gave us their name--Angle-land. According to legend, Pope Gregory eyed a group of fair-haired, fair-skinned slaves in the Roman marketplace and wanted to know their origins. Upon being told they were Angles, he quipped Non Angli, sed Angeli. Oh, Gregory, you so funny...
**Which, by the way, was the very LAST successful invasion of the British Isles. Take THAT, Philip II and Hitler!
*** Norseman --> Norman, just another variation on the Big Incestuous Melting Pot of Northern Europe.
I am the daughter of a commercial airline pilot (former Navy) and my family and I have always been hyper-aware of airplane crashes. Having grown up in the DC area, I vividly remember this accident when it happened—the magnitude of the disaster stunned me. A heavy snowstorm, the really wet, icy, messy kind in which the DC area seems to specialize. 14th Street Bridge taken out. 78 people killed, mostly immediately. In the water. They were never even really airborne, the plane just kind of lumbered into the air and flopped down into the river like a dodo bird, breaking through the ice and disappearing almost completely.
And worse and worse.
The federal government had released its employees early that day because of the storm, so the roads were packed with commuters—4 of the killed were on the bridge.
Metro, the DC area’s subway system, had its first fatal accident that day—so the Orange and Blue Lines were both suspended.
The few passengers who survived the crash found themselves in the Potomac River—a dangerous river even in optimum conditions, it was now choked with ice floes. Stunned, broken and literally freezing, they could do nothing to help themselves—they could only wait to be rescued. And wait they did—the only way to reach the survivors was now either by air or by water.
There is something especially haunting about dying underwater—the claustrophobia, the dark, the horrible inversion of Freudian birth imagery. And the river was cold, so cold. The survivors had only minutes to spare before hyperthermia would kill them, and many were blind from the aviation fuel that now covered the surface of the river. The helicopters arrived and hovered over and on the waters, throwing down rescue lines to tow the people to shore. At one point the skids of the 'copter went below the surface.
Bystanders on the bridge and the riverbanks were shouting encouragement to the flailing survivors. Hold on, just hold on. Help is coming. Stay strong. The river was so narrow, the survivors so close, everyone could see them easily--you could feel their struggles, you could read the expressions on their faces.
Eventually Priscilla Tirado, who’d broken both her arms and had lost her husband and baby in the crash, simply could not hold on any more and began to go under. In a breathtaking feat of heroism, Lenny Skutnik, one of the bystanders on the bridge, stripped to his shirtsleeves and bare feet and dove in to help her.
To this day, if you asked a DC-er who was around in 1982 who Lenny Skutnik is, they will remember. A month after Flight 90, the Washington Post published its annual Valentine's Day personals, and one anonymous admirer captured the gratitude of a region, saying simply WE LOVE YOU LENNY SKUTNIK. But Skutnik was only the most famous--the day had several other heroes. Roger Olian, who jumped in merely to give comfort to the survivors, even though he believed the situation was hopeless. Arland Williams who survived the initial impact and passed the rope to several other passengers until he slipped under the waters. That section of the 14th Street Bridge is now named after him.
Flight 90 happened 30 years ago, when the airline industry was very different from what it is today. In the early '80s airline travel, in the midst of de-regulation, was nonetheless comparatively glamorous and exotic. My father and his cohorts were widely admired. And gradually the glamor eroded--as customers compared bargains, precipitating a race to the bottom, the legacy carriers, with infinitesimally small profit margins, eliminated more and more perks. Airlines are considered by some today little better than buses in the sky, the highly-trained pilots and crew dismissed as mere functionaries.
And then, a few years ago, another airline disaster nearly happened, and the parallels were striking. A southbound flight, crippled just after takeoff. A river in a major metropolitan area. Mid-January. But Captain Sullenberger and his crew rewrote the narrative and gave us the Miracle on the Hudson. Instead of 78 killed, every single passenger and crew member was saved, with scant injury.*
To put this in perspective, this was the most successful ditching of a commercial liner EVER--all previous commercial ditchings incurred fatalities. The margin of error is so much less forgiving with commercial jets--they are more unwieldy and more difficult to maneuver, the wings are longer, the number of possible casualties much higher. But Sully never blinked--cool and calm he told his passengers to "brace for impact"** and guided his wounded craft onto the freezing water.
He and his crew made me proud, so proud, to have a father who's an airline pilot.
*Admittedly faced with a very different kind of challenge. Pilots [i.e., military ones] are trained for ditchings, whereas Captain Wheaton and First Officer Pettit, the Air Florida pilots, never had a chance, as the plane never even really lifted off.
**Sully seems to have a gift for pithiness--I love his reply to the air traffic controller's suggestion that he turn around and land at LaGuardia. One word: "Unable."
