The Reading Room

9:05 AM

1

Q: What is the origin of the name Nilfgaard?

The empire of Nilfgaard becomes very important in the Witcher saga starting from the end of Sword of Destiny and continuing through the novels starting with Blood of Elves. The name has always intrigued me (and slightly confused me as I never remember whether it's Nilfgaard or Niflgaard). It look...

Rand al'Thor

@Bookworm @NapoleonWilson I was reminded to ask this by noticing your profile location description, Cahir.

Napoleon Wilson

I would think they're anything but Scandinavian. The cliché Scandinavians would probably be in Kovir and Povis, or maybe the Skellige Isles. I always envisioned the Empire as kind of a "Black Rome". But that might be entirely my own intuition since the novels stay decidely short on architectural and cultural exposition. (And the two games I played so far in turn stay short of Nilfgaardians.)

Gallifreyan

I've always wondered the same about the name

I think I used to have a game-derived map of the continent somewhere

Tsundoku

9:42 AM

I'm not familiar with The Witcher, but my guess is that "Niflgaard" (as a name) is a portmanteau of Niflheim and Asgard with a metathesis of 'f' and 'l'.

Gallifreyan

10:08 AM

"gaard" seems to be a suffix roughly meaning "place" for our practical purposes, so the question boils down to the meaning of "Nilf", be it a word Sapkowski made up, a jumbling of "Nifl", or something else

I wish he had a Twitter, that'd make it easy to settle this :D

Tsundoku

In fact, "gaard" still exists as a suffix in several Dutch words: olijfgaard (olive grove), boomgaard (orchard), diergaard (~ zoo), etc.

Napoleon Wilson

10:48 AM

I was almost about to say "aa" felt a lot more Dutch than Scandinavian to me.

Rand al'Thor

11:00 AM

@NapoleonWilson Indeed: if the Nilfgaardians were northerners with longboats, the question would be less interesting ;-) It doesn't seem to be a very Roman type of name.

Tsundoku

11:43 AM

A book on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale that arrived just this morning contains a section with 14 questions about the play, many of which look like good questions for this site. They will look like homework questions, but that's because such questions often require looking into a work's literariness.

However, I'm not sure I will post all of them, because some of them require essay-length answers.

Rand al'Thor

Oh nice. That's one of the Shakespeare plays I've studied in detail.

Tsundoku

I have other books in the same series (Macmillan's "Casebook Series" from the 60s and 70s) but this is the first volume in which I have found a list of questions like this.

I don't know, for example, whether I should post the following "question": "Write detailed character-sketches of the following with detailed references to the text: Leontes; Hermiione; Polixenes; Paulina; Autolycus." The reason is that it is not clear what aspect of the work this is supposed to clarify.

I have the same issue with the question "Compare Perdita with Marina and Miranda." OK, but to what purpose?

Rand al'Thor

12:00 PM

If posted just like that without more specifying details, I'd call those questions too broad/open-ended to work well here. Comparing specific aspects of the characters, or even asking whether a particular character description holds water, could be interesting, but not just "compare these characters" or "write a detailed description of this character".

Tsundoku

With the last question, people might wonder Marina Who? Since Pericles is not a very popular play.

And moving back to Niflgaard vs Nilfgaard: I found out that there is a "precedent" for "Nilf-...": Nilfrid is a rare given name.

Rand al'Thor

For example, is Leontes's behaviour as a husband directly connected to his status as a king? That could be a good question IMO: answers might gather evidence that he was an over-proud ruler and this influenced his treatment of his wife, or that his behaviour as monarch and as husband can be considered separately.

Napoleon Wilson

@Tsundoku It also seems quite a bit too broad for a distinct question.

Tsundoku

Shakespeare tended to use characters of noble descent. Othello, another famously jealous character, is an exception.

@NapoleonWilson Even when you split the question up by character (i.e. one question per character), I would still like the question to specify to what purpose you are doing this. What does the asker want to learn?

Napoleon Wilson

@Tsundoku I would expect the name of the play to be part of the question. ;-)

Rand al'Thor

12:08 PM

Does Polixenes's behaviour in the second half of the play mirror Leontes's in the first? It's curious how Polixenes is set up as more of a sympathetic victim character in the first half, but then morphs into another angry king in the second.

Tsundoku

Polixenes's anger doesn't last long, but the characters around him seem to miss that, just like many readers...

Rand al'Thor

Actually The Winter's Tale is a very odd play all told. Very hard to classify into comedy or tragedy, split into two halves with very different atmospheres, ...

Napoleon Wilson

@Tsundoku Oh, then maybe not, yes. But I agree that something like "describe this character" would feel kind of odd and I too would expect more something along the lines of "why does he act like this" or "what makes her the person she is" based ona conflict or mystery the asker sees with the text.

Rand al'Thor

At least it's obvious where to put the interval in a performance ;-)

Tsundoku

The Winter's Tale is hard to classify according to our categories of comedy or tragedy. The renaissance concept of comedy was different from ours.

Napoleon Wilson

12:11 PM

That's why homework questions can feel weird. Not because they're homework, but they can feel like empty templates without a purpose due to that nature.

Tsundoku

@NapoleonWilson The problem with that wording is that readers tend to look at psychology at the expense of how the work does this as a work of literature. (Cf. "literariness" three days ago.)

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Also some homework questions are more like a writing prompt than a real answerable question. "Write an essay about X" is never going to be a workable SE question.

Napoleon Wilson

@Tsundoku Granted. But I'd guess that's just a matter of interest of the asker. And nothing precludes both to intermingle within an answer.

But of course if your point is propagating more literariness, I can understand that vest pocket psychology might not be furthering that aspiration.

Napoleon Wilson

12:28 PM

But thanks for giving me inspirations of how to improve one of the answers I'm drafting.

Napoleon Wilson

12:45 PM

It's also very considerate to advertize the topic challenge over a month in advance so people can engage the topic already and prepare a reasonable stock of already read works.

Tsundoku

And enough time to order a physical book, like I often do. I'm old-fashioned in that regard.

Napoleon Wilson

I would prefer that, too. Besides books I can have others read for me while concerning myself with driving.

Reading from a phone is kind of hmpf. Although, I have occasionally bought Kindle versions when the book is sufficiently short and I was just not willing to pay the much higher price of a physical work for only a marginal interest.

Tsundoku

1:02 PM

@NapoleonWilson "Vest-pocket psychology" would fail to impress any literature professor using British English ;-)

Gareth Rees

@Tsundoku The New Critics derided this kind of thing as "character-mongering" (that is, gossip)

It seems like a bit of an over-reaction now but in their historical context it was probably necessary

Tsundoku

In spite of what they contributed to the development of literary criticism, I wouldn't use their standards as the yardstick for literary criticism. (The New Critics have been at the wrong end of some derision themselves.)

In the 19th-century, there was a trend to treat characters as if they were real persons and people wrote things like "The Girldhood of Shakespeare's Characters". The New Critics rid us of that type of nonsense, among other things.

Critics now acknowledge that Hamlet, Ophelia, etc are marks on a page and that the "characters" don't exist until we read those marks. But the general reader often tends to ask what happened before the play.

Rand al'Thor

1:21 PM

@Tsundoku Girlhood? Or should I learn a new word?

Tsundoku

Literally: The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines by Mary Cowden Clark, 1881 (Archive.org)

@Randal'Thor I assume you have never read any herstory?

Hisstory is so sexist, isn't it?

Gareth Rees

@Tsundoku The character-mongering period and the reaction against it is a significant link in the story of the documentary theory of fiction. I have a vague intention of writing it up -- there's Ellen Terry and A. C. Bradley as well as Mary Cowden Clark

Rand al'Thor

While his tory sounds like something about the UK Conservative Party.

Napoleon Wilson

I'd say you'd get in trouble for offering only these two alternatives. But maybe let's not get there. ;-)

Tsundoku

Let's just call it story then.

Napoleon Wilson

1:25 PM

Because it's all fictional anyway?

Rand al'Thor

@GarethRees I haven't upvoted your answer there because, although Bentley's criticism of Milton is a good early example, you haven't shown much evidence that other proponents of the "Word of God" approach derived, directly or indirectly, by Bentley. It's an example but not necessarily an origin.

Tsundoku

Not necessarily fictional, but it's all text. There is nothing outside the text, according to some literary theorists. "Text" in a textile sense: everything is interwoven.

Napoleon Wilson

I was talking about history, but yes, that probably applies to that, too.

Rand al'Thor

My theory, for which I haven't yet articulated enough support to make it an answer, is that fans of science fiction and especially fantasy often subscribe to "Word of God" approaches because, when it comes to entire fictional worlds and stories that blatantly break the normal laws of physics, sometimes the author's word really is all you've got to go on for the stuff they created.

In a totally fantastical story, lots of common-sense arguments that would apply in real life go out of the window. Who's to say whether this world has seasons, or how these creatures behave, unless we have a quote from the author to say so?

And if people are used to "ask the author" as a go-to response for the imaginary world they've created, it might also become a go-to response even for other types of questions about the story. Even for questions where that response makes a lot less sense, like "is this story allegorical".

(I've had some extended debate at Science Fiction & Fantasy SE with people who think the only possible answer to "does The Lord of the Rings contain any allegory?" is "Tolkien said he didn't like allegory and didn't want to include it, so no, end of story".)

Tsundoku

That seems to confirm my suspicion that fantasy readers put more store in authorial intent than people who don't read fantasy. Literary critics laugh at authorial intent, really.

We've had a few questions about authorial intent in the past, which I still intend to answer.

Napoleon Wilson

1:34 PM

Laughing at it seems a bit...unprofessional.

Rand al'Thor

I'm not sure if that's the case in general, re fantasy and authorial intent, or if I'm biased by SE experience. But it does make sense in a way.

Mar 25 '17 at 1:16, by Rand al'Thor

Tsundoku

"Lauging" was a bit of an overstatement. But when you read literary criticism, the tendency is: "Authorial intent? Who cares?"

Napoleon Wilson

Yes yes.

I would also pose that speculative fiction, specifically its more worldbuilding-based appeal naturally finds more appreciation with people more inclined to the hard sciences and logical reasoning, which is also the primary clientel of the Stack Exchange network due to its inception as a programming site for the "tech world".

Rand al'Thor

That's another good point.

On the other hand, programmers should be aware that they can read code to find out what it does without needing to ask what the person who wrote it intended it to do ;-)

Mithical

....ha.

Relatively sure any programmer can tell you that no, you can't always read the code, sometimes you do need to ask the person who wrote it. ;) I don't code, but I hang out with enough developers to tell you that much :P

Tsundoku

1:47 PM

@Randal'Thor Programmers ~~often~~ sometimes can't read the code that they wrote a few months earlier, though.

Rand al'Thor

Did I just out myself as a non-tech person?

Mithical

Absolutely.

Rand al'Thor

Damn, then it seems maths really is the only subject of objective truth :-P Where proofs can be understood in their own right, independent of scientific theories or individual writers.

But surely code must objectively do the thing it does, without reference to who wrote it, otherwise how could a computer understand it?

Napoleon Wilson

As in literature you sometimes have to sacrifice clarity for aesthetics, even if the ultimate goal should be one benefiting the other.

Tsundoku

But of course, the mantra of open-source development is: "everyone is welcome to contribute"

@Randal'Thor Code does what it was meant to do if it is given the type of input the coder expected it to receive. Sometimes it gets a different type of input because the developer overlooked edge cases etc.

Regarding readability: "Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." (Jeff Atwood's blog, though he didn't come up with the idea. Yes, it's the same Jeff Atwood.)

Basically the opposite idea of writing literary theory.

Rand al'Thor

1:57 PM

The same Jeff Atwood who threatened to come round and bludgeon people who reported pluralisation bugs. Taking his own words seriously, then.

Napoleon Wilson

These are all neat party quips, but there's still an aesthetic value to code that is to some degree subjective and the suppression of which in favour of explaining everything to a 5-year old would hurt one's artistic aspirations. Of course the ideal is a commitment to a language in a way that the language's natural (and thus most understandable) way of realizing something is also the one you find the most beautiful, but that's not always given.

Gareth Rees

2:15 PM

@Randal'Thor My belief is that it is a folk theory, so there is no particular origin and it is prone to keep being reinvented without there being any continuity of tradition.

Rand al'Thor

3:10 PM

Of the last 4 questions on the site, 2 are closed without answers and 2 were posted by me. It's not looking good for our QPD ...

Tsundoku

3:30 PM

Quiz: How well do you know Shakespeare?. I'm going to test that now.

Five questions; I got only the last one wrong.

Napoleon Wilson

3:45 PM

I only got the first 2 right. :'(

Tsundoku

It all depends a lot on how much you've immersed yourself into Shakespeare. (You might have seen my bookshelves.)

Napoleon Wilson

Well, they're less questions about his works, though. ;-)

Mithical

I've barely read any Shakespeare. Let's see how well I do.

Napoleon Wilson

I've been to his theatre (or the reconstruction thereof) once, though. But sadly not for a performance.

Mithical

4/5. Not terrible.

Got the last one wrong as well.

Tsundoku

3:54 PM

I visited the reconstructed Globe in the early 2000s (2004?), but after the theatre season, so we only got a tour and no performance.

But I couldn't resist buying a few books there ...

Napoleon Wilson

In fact it was really disappointing since I (maybe quite naively) thought we were going to attend a performance. But we only did a tour and some kind of short acting workshop backstage.

Tsundoku

Well, the Globe is closed right now. It's just like the closures due to the plague in Shakespeare's day.

Napoleon Wilson

That would actually have been around 2004, too. Heh.

@Tsundoku I was considerate not to spoil the quiz for anyone else, though. ;-P

Tsundoku

Oh, wait, it was in December 2001. I went to London several times in the early 2000s (due to meetings).

I also attended a performance of the Reduced Shakespeare Company in London, either in 2002 or 2004. I had booked a hotel room on Piccadilly Circus, and their show was put up by a theatre there. When they asked the audience who had read Coriolanus, only two people raised their hands.

Napoleon Wilson

And you were one of them?

Tsundoku

4:04 PM

For those not familiar with the Reduced Shakespeare Company (the other "RSC"): they do The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in less than 90 minutes.

Yes, I was one of them.

Napoleon Wilson

Wait, you mean all one after the other in 90 minutes?

Tsundoku

Exactly, a sort of whistle-stop tour of the highlights, and with just three actors.

Napoleon Wilson

Heh, I'll save that for later.

Although I would probably recongize about 3 works, I guess. ;-)

Tsundoku

But they didn't want to include Coriolanus, "because nobody reads that anyway", due to the ending. Not the play's ending, the title's ending.

It's hilarious, regardless how much of Shakespeare you've read.

Bookworm

4:19 PM

0

Q: What evidence is there that Shakespeare revised The Winter's Tale after 1611?

Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale was probably written in the years 1610-1611, making it one of the author's last plays. The play's text was first published in the "First Folio" of 1623, seven years after the author's death. Many of Shakespeare's earlier plays were first published in quarto edition...

william-shakespeare the-winters-tale

Napoleon Wilson

4:31 PM

I didn't know Heine's Winter's Tale was supossed to be referencing Shakespeare's (though, I didn't know too much about the latter's existence to begin with).

Rand al'Thor

4:48 PM

@Tsundoku Whaaat, seriously?

We've just overtaken Hardware Recommendations and creeping up on Bricks by site question count.

Tsundoku

5:04 PM

@Randal'Thor Of course, that was all part of the comedy.

Bookworm

6:24 PM

0

Q: Trying to find a story of a man who strapped a magnet to his forehead, has visions

Many years ago I read a story of a man who experimented with a magnet strapped to his forehead. From what I remember, he examined this experiment in his attic study. He harnessed a magnet on his forehead for what I believe was an hour per day. After a time, he noticed a ghostly boy running thro...

story-identification

b_jonas

7:27 PM

@Randal'Thor Hmm. I remember scifi.stackexchange.com/q/114046/4918 Is Harry Potter a World War II allegory?

But apparently there's also scifi.stackexchange.com/q/89995/4918 How much did Tolkien write about the connection between WWI and his work? and scifi.stackexchange.com/q/172900/4918 Are there any specific examples in Lord of the Rings that are influenced by WWII?

And yes, the answer to the first one mentions a letter by Tolkien saying "There is no 'allegory'"

Gareth Rees

7:57 PM

@b_jonas I think it comes down to definition of words — Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, so when he uses the word "allegory" he means "deliberate scheme of symbolic representation" like the ones in The Faerie Queene or Pilgrim's Progress

But "allegory" also is used more loosely, with reference to anything that has allusive or symbolic content

So Tolkien's works can be allegorical in one sense but not the other

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas The WWII question was even closed as a duplicate of the WWI question for a time, on the basis that all questions about allegory in Tolkien's work are answered by "no, he said there's no allegory".

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