The Reading Room

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6:30 AM

Always worth bringing up John Hodgson's 173-page footnote for those who haven't heard of it before. A huge contribution to scholarship, but he put it in a footnote because technically it didn't fall under the immediate topic of the book. — dbmag9 20 hours ago

That is fascinating. Not just because it's a 173-page-long footnote (duh), but because for centuries everyone thought Hadrian's Wall was built by Severus. The process of this wrong information becoming accepted "fact", and then of tearing it down by methodical research, vaguely reminds me of some (Gareth?) answers on this site.

Bookworm

7:26 AM

Q: Paul D's prison and escape in Toni Morrison's Beloved

I'm reading Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. Chapter 10 talks of Paul D's time as a black slave imprisoned for the attempted murder of his new "owner" as well as his subsequent escape along with his fellow inmates. I'm finding the prisons hard to envision with the help of the description and the in...

6 hours later…

Gareth Rees

1:12 PM

@Randal'Thor Hodgson's epic footnote starts at History of Northumberland, part II, volume III, page 149.

If you like the genre of epic demolitions of conventional wisdom, another example is Richard Bentley's A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris (1699) which convincingly demonstrated that said epistles are forgeries or fictions.

I also recommend Lorenzo Valla's Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine (1440).

bobble

1:40 PM

@Bookworm does this fit [interpretation]?

3 hours later…

Tsundoku

5:08 PM

@bobble No. The asker wants information to help them visualise what the prison cells look like rather than literary interpretation.

> Imagine being Hodgson's typesetter. He rocks up with his manuscript.
> "Any footnotes in this guv?"
> "Um. Just a couple."

(From one of the tweets.)

Unrelated: Announcing a Pro Tempore election for 2022 on Language Learning SE.

2 hours later…

Bookworm

6:58 PM

Q: Was Newt Scamander inspired by Radagast the Brown?

As the title says. Is there a connection between Rowling's Newt Scamander, a wizard zoologist, and Radagast the Brown? Being the latter one of the five magicians of Tolkien's Middle Earth, and the one that was especially concerned with the well-being of plants and animals?

inspiration j-r-r-tolkien harry-potter

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku Replacing fi12 already?

@Bookworm Aliens harvesting HNQ from a post.

2 hours later…

Tsundoku

8:39 PM

@Randal'Thor Yes, I've doing 90-95% of the moderation work for several years and that didn't change after the previous election.

Special issue of Philosophie Magazin: Der Herr der Ringe. Tolkien und sein Mythos. Actually published during the summer but I hadn't noticed it until today.

2 hours later…