SELECTED ENDNOTES (7)

5. Vargr (wolf or monster) was used in Icelandic law codes to refer to outlaws (see no. 4) who could be

12th century woodcarving showing
Sigurd cleaving the anvil upon which
Regis has just forged his sword

hunted down like wolves. The phrase "wolf in hallowed places" suggests an outlaw guilty of murder or of a particularly serious offense, especially committing a crime within a hallowed place or sanctuary.

8. These lines are somewhat convoluted. The sense of the passage is that Rerir is caught between a rock and a hard place: he must either kill his maternal uncles or let his father go unavenged.

11. The ability to put on a shape made of feathers, i.e., a bird shape, is commonly attributed to supernatural women in Old Icelandic literature.

18. Odin is often portrayed in the legendary sagas as visiting men in such a disguise. His headgear, referred to as a deep hood, was probably a form of hat. The story of how Odin lost his eye to obtain wisdom is told by Snorri in the Prose Edda.

26. Laukr (leek) may also refer to garlic. Both leek and garlic are considered in many cultures to have magical or medicinal properties.

30. The conversation that follows is a senna, or a contest of insults. Such contests are frequent in Old Icelandic literature. Most of the insults in this senna make use of one of the worst possible affronts in the culture, i.e., accusations of effeminacy or passive homosexuality. In Iceland, to accuse someone of passive homosexuality was punishable by outlawry.

37. Odin again. One of Odin's function was that of psychopomp, guide to the underworld.

“Odin the Wanderer” by Georg von Rosen (1886)

45. Odin's eight-leggged horse.

46. This passage may also be read, "I know of the kin of this serpent."

47. Loki is the trickster of Old Norse myth. He is an ambiguous figure, sometimes on the side of the giants, sometimes on the side of the gods. The two aspects of his character are evident in this tale: he places the gods in danger, only to rescue them.

56. Hugin may refer to one of Odin's two ravens. More probably the word refers not to any specific raven but to a huginn, a poetic synonym for raven. "To gladden the raven" meant "to kill men in battle."

59. According to the "Lay of Fafnir," Sigurd withheld his name because of an ancient belief that  a

Sigurd slays Fafnir

dying man could curse his enemy if he knew his enemy's name.

62. A reference to Ragnarok, the end of the world. Surt is a fire-giant who, after defeating the god Frey in a final battle, will cover the world with flame.

72. Bragi, a god of poetry. Bragi may have been a ninth-century Norwegian poet who was elevated to the status of a god by later writers.

91. Probably a reference to Brynhild's being a valkyrie.

93. Presumably the reference is to Grimhild's "ale of forgetfulness," which Sigurd consumed in chapter 28.

98. According to widespread medieval belief, the arteries were considered the ducts of air, whereas the veins were understood to be passages for blood.

108. A difficult passage. Literally it reads: "You said you would visit me and wait for me in Hel."

Brynhild (Brunhilde)

Selected from the endnotes to  The Saga of the Volsungs

Translated by Jesse L. Byock

Penguin,  1990

SELECTED ENDNOTES (6)

Page 7: 7.155. The epitaph appears in the Anthology in a tract of poems attributed to Isidorus of Aigae, sixth century BCE. The actual century of its composition is uncertain.

Page 11: 7.621. Sardinian celery. Ranculus sardous. According to the American poet Keith Waldrop, "a poisonous herb, whose bitter taste could draw the lips back in a grin or sarcastic snarl, sardonic, like a dog's." See A Windmill Near Calvary, University of Michigan Press, 1968. p 21.

Page 16: Friedlander, no. 135. This appears to be the oldest extant epitaph in elegiac couplets. It's four verses stood on a pillar along the main road running from Athens through the suburb of Sepolia. It seems to date from 575 - 550 BCE.

Page 17: Clairmont, no. 24, plate 12. Another very old example, the lines accompany a gravestone cameo depicting an exuberant horse and its youthful rider (perhaps about to be thrown).

Page 18: 7.325. Sardanapallus. The epitaph reads well on its own but rests on a complex allusion. In Greek legend, Sardanapallus, the last in the line of thirty kings of Assyria, is emblematic of the scandalous and slothful life. Herodotus, Ctesias, Diodorus Siculus, Aristophanes and others tell his story or allude to him. Aristotle cites him as the lowest category of human existence, the "Life of Enjoyment," suitable only for beasts. In 682 BCE Sardanapallus's capital Ninevah was besieged. Two years into the siege, the Tigris river undermined his palace walls. Rather than live as a captive, he collected his wives and his treasure and set fire to them and himself.

Page 32: 7.248: The epitaph was inscribed on a monument dedicated to all the Greeks who fell while attempting to hold the pass against an invading Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The size of the Persian army is exaggerated here ten times or more. The size of the Greek defense, which included about a thousand Spartan slaves, is accurate.

Page 42: 7.268. Minos. A legendary king of Crete, a great lawgiver, he was made a judge in Hades.

Page 65: 7.170. He's sleeping still. The epitaph may have been carved into the base of a stone depicting a woman holding a child.

Page 80: 7. 454. The ancient Greeks considered it barbaric to drink undiluted wine. They had no beer or distilled spirits.

Page 92: 7.545. As this epitaph points out, the road to the Grecian underworld divided into a right-hand path that led good souls down to Elysium and a left-hand path for those less worthy, who went to sufferings in Tartarus. Hades' three judges, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, met the dead at the crossroads and passed judgment.

Page 149: 7.744. The epitaph concerns a form of prophecy and fortune telling associated with bulls.

Excerpted from Cut  These Words Into My Stone, Ancient Greek Epitaphs

translated by Michael Wolfe

Johns Hopkins University Press,  2013

SELECTED ENDNOTES (5) : Rene Daumal

2. Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858 - 1937) was a Bengali polymath, whose discoveries in plant physiology were but a fraction of his contributions to science.

6.  Macula lutea: small yellowish area of the retina near the optic disk that provides central vision.

13.  Dinothere: any elephantlike mammal of the extinct genus Dinotherium, from the later Tertiary period of Europe and Asia, having large, outwardly curving tusks.

14.  No doubt related to "pagne," "loincloth."

17. "Yes, yes, yes, very well, not only, but also."

26. The reader is encouraged to sing these words to the tune of "Il est ne le divin enfant."

28. Daumal is perhaps humorously refering to Saint Gudula (in French, Sainte Gudule), an eleventh-century Belgian saint.

32. Carl Oluf Jensen (1864 - 1934), a Danish veterinary scientist best remembered for his discovery that mouse mammary tumors are malignant and transplantable; he would die a few months after Daumal was writing this.

40. In 1934, a woman in Pirano, Italy, is reported to have been witnessed emitting a glow of light from her chest as she slept. She was examined by Dr. Protti.

62. Daumal is most likely referring to Peter Bender, a German World War I pilot who introduced the theory of the hollow globe of Cyrus Reed Teed into Germany; Benders Hohlweltlehre (hollow earth theory) indeed grew popular in the 1930's, and in 1933, Rudolf Nebel, a member of the Nazi party, received funding to carry out the Magdeburg Project: to send a powerful rocket straight up from Magdeburg in order to hit south New Zealand. Funds ran out after eight attempts. Bender himself would meet his demise after the failure of another Nazi initiative, in which a German naval expedition was sent to Rugen Island in order to detect British ships by means of powerful telescopes pointed skyward. The disastrous outcome resulted in Bender and his wife being sent to a death camp.

74. "The Metamorphosis of King Louis-Philippe into a Pear," a famous satirical series of drawings showing the gradual change of the head of the King into a pear (a "fathead"), was executed by Charles Philipon and later by Honore Daumier, both in the nineteenth century.

81. Presumably the Goose Lake Meteorite, which fell in Modoc County in 1938 and was removed from the site in 1939.

Selected from the endnotes to

Pataphysical Essays by Rene Daumal

Translated by Thomas Vosteen

Wakefield Press, 2012

SELECTED ENDNOTES (4)

p. 3 Tokens: in modern parlance, cutaneous lesions resulting from subcutaneous haemorrhaging, a common plague symptom. Defoe owned a copy of Kephale's Medela Pestilentia, which says they were otherwise known as 'God's Tokens.' ...

p.6 Spotted Fever: a "politic word" for the plague...

     Apprehensions...Summer being at Hand: from Hippocrates descended the idea of a special relationship between climate or seasons and disease. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the prevailing view was the plague originated in hot climates, flourished in the heat of summer, and abated in the cold of winter...

p. 15 hardly anything of Reformation: observing the King and his courtiers at Oxford during the Plague, Anthony Wood noted in his diary: "The greater part of the courtiers were high, proud, insolent...To give a further character of the court, they thought they were neat and gay in their apparell, yet they were nasty and beastly...Rude, rough, whoremongers; vain, empty, careless."

p. 18 a blazing star or comet: in mid-December 1664, and early April 1665, the appearance of comets over London were related to plague in popular literature and scientific discussions....

p. 20 run about Naked: ... The literature of Quakerism contains many instances of the practice of "testifying by signs." London, as the new Babylon, was often the subject of prophetic doom. Defoe had in mind the notorious case of Solomon Eagles (or Eccles), a musician and convert to Quakerism who "as a sign" ran naked through Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield with a pan of fire or brimstone on his head, crying "repentance" and "remember Sodom." But that incident took place in 1662.

p. 29 amulets: widely recommended and widely disapproved in the seventeenth century, they had the authority of Andre Pare ('a sachet of some poison over the heart') and Van Helmont, whose use of a toad for the purpose was respectfully mentioned and imitated..."Those who use Toads either bore a hole through their heads, and so hang them about their Necks, or make Troches of them."...

p. 29 Dead-Carts: the bearers who collected the bodies of the dead in carts or barrows, obviously not the most squeamish of men, were the objects of constant criticism in times of plague for their callousness.

p. 35 Searchers: ...The custom of appointing "ancient women" to be searchers, whose function in times of plague was to seek out the dead and report the cause of death to parish clerks, was strongly criticized...

p. 36 Botch, or Purple:  physicians and writers on the plague attempted to distinguish the external manifestations of the malady. The various spot, swellings, tumours were called tokens, botches, carbuncles, buboes, or blains. Kemp's Brief Treatise describes the botch as "a swelling about the bigness of a nutmeg, Wallnut, or Hen's Egge, and cometh in the neck, or behind the Eares if the Brain be affected; or under the Arm-pits, from the Heart; or in the Groin, from the liver; for the cure whereof, pull off the feathers from the Rump of a Cock, Hen, or Pigeon, and rub the Tayl with Salt, and hold its Bill, and set the Tayl hard to the swelling, and it will die."

p. 39 a red Rod or Wand: the earliest surviving English plague orders (1543) require that an infected person or anyone in contact with an infected person carry a white wand in his hand. In subsequent orders the wand continued to be required, sometimes white, sometimes red...

p. 64 conveyed by the fatal Breath: ..."one cause of the sickness is the Corruption and Infection of the Air; for when the Plague begins to raign in any Place...the Sick continually not only breathe out of their Mouths, but send out of their Bodies steams and vapours, which being disperst and scattered in the Air, are soon drawn in by the breath of others..."

p. 65 immediate Stroke from Heaven: the wrath of God theory was a venerable one...

p. 78 Garlick and Rue: in addition to these, other herbs, spices, barks, flowers and seeds were recommended: aloes, amber, ambergris, angelica, balm, bay leaves, benjamin, campana roots, camphor, cinnamon, citrine sanderes, cloves, emula, frankincense, gentian, hyssop, juniper, lavender, mace, marjoram, mint, musk, myrrh, nutmeg, origanum, penny royal, rosemary, saffron, sage, sassafras, sorax, tansy, thyme, wormwood....

p. 105 kill all the Dogs and Cats: the plague orders regularly called for the destruction of domestic animals...

p. 165 Air...corrupted and  infected: here...Defoe views the plague from the vantage of a contagionist rather a miasmatist...The miasmatist conception was well stated by Boghurst: "...The Plague or Pestilence is a most subtle, peculiar, insinuating, venomous, deleterious Exhalation of the Foeces of the Earth extracted into the Aire by the heat of the sun, and difflated from place to place by the winds, and most tymes gradually but sometymes immediately aggressing apt bodies."

p. 195 People...flock'd to Town: "And a delightfull thing it is to see the towne full of people again as now it is; and shops begin to open, though in many places seven or eight together, and more, all shut; and yet the towne is full compared to what it used to be. (Pepys, Diary, 5 Jan.  1665-6)...

p. 204 Wine: an antidote of hoary respectability...

Selected from the endotes to

A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe

Oxford World Classics,  Edited with notes by Louis Landa

SELECTED ENDNOTES (3)

2. Among the ancient Turks, male animals were regarded as the most acceptable form of sacrifice.

5. Kumis is fermented mare's milk. Marco Polo says of the Tartars..."Their drink is mare's milk, prepared in such a way that you would take it for white wine; and a right good drink it is, called by them Kemiz."

15. Neyrek's escape from Bayburt is narrated in the next story, in which the infidel king who imprisoned him is not named but must have been Parasar.

27. It was an ancient Turkish belief that the best horses were those sired by a supernatural stallion which came forth from a mountain, lake, or sea.

43. Red is still the colour of the bride's veil at village weddings in Turkey, though urban girls nowadays prefer white.

57. Among the Kirghiz it is still the practice to make ninefold gifts, and the animals given as bride-price -- camels, horses, or whatever -- are still given in multiples of nine, up to a lavish nine times nine.

63 This does not mean that the enemy will not seek vengeance, but that they are outside the community within which blood money, rather than blood, can be exacted.

71. The sense must be that weeping was far from him but suddenly found him.

74. Azrael is the name Muslims give to the Angel of Death.

78. A fine earthy vignette: the lice were dislodged because the old man was quaking with fear.

91. The Vatican MS reads "I saw a man with six heads."

99. To the Turkish ear, the name of Goggle-eye's lair suggests "slaughterhouse."

131. Perversity seems to be a characteristic of the people of this infidel city, including the young women in the mysterious penultimate line of the passage...

144. The meaning is that the prince should not allow anyone who is not an accredited bard to perform for him, the next sentence being a thinly veiled threat of supernatural retribution if he does so.

159. Noah, like many other Biblical characters, appears in the Koran as a prophet. According to Islamic legend, the ant was the first creature to enter the Ark, the donkey being the last because Ibis was holding its tail. Noah became impatient and cried out, "Come on, even if the Devil is with you!" whereupon the donkey and the Devil came on board together.

Selected from the endnotes to

The Book Of Dede Korkut

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Geoffrey Lewis

Penguin Edition

SELECTED ENDNOTES (2)

6. misdoubting his intent 'fearing that he had taken on too much.'

12. project plan.

success outcome (good or bad).

13 - 14. wide field...blind Cp. PL vii 17 -20 where M. likens himself to Bellerophon wandering 'on th'Aleian field,' having been thrown from Pegasus (a symbol of poetic daring).

35. horror including 'awe or reverent fear' (OED 4).

49. bushy-points A 'point' was 'a tagged lace or cord, of twisted yarn, silk, or leather, for attaching the hose to the doublet. ' (OED sb1 B5) Points were 'bushy' when tied in tassels. Marvell therefore likens rhyme to a vain fashion. Points were also a byword for 'something of small value' (OED).

54. Number, weight, and measure Cp Wisdom 11:20: 'thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.' Cp. also M.'s defence of blank verse in his note on "The Verse": 'true musical delight...consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.'

(Selected from notes to On Paradise Lost by Andrew Marvell, published as a preface to the 1674 second edition of Paradise Lost. Notes from the Penguin Edition of Paradise Lost edited by John Leonard.)

SELECTED ENDNOTES (I)

3. Ascetics are often irascible and prone to utter curses.

9. The moon.

10. The lion.

32. The Dandaka was a vast region of forests stretching between the rivers Yumuna and Godavari in central India, inhabited and ruled by the very first nations of India, so to speak. Janasthana was a powerful kingdom, part of an empire ruled by Ravana, probably lying on both banks of the Godavari. Khava and his brother were governors of Janasthana and generals in Ravana's mighty army. Marica was Ravana's uncle who took the form of a golden deer to trick Rama so that Siva would be abducted (see note 48). Surpanakha, literally "sharp-nailed," was Ravana's sister. She fell in love with Rama in exile in the forests of Dandaka; Rama rejected her and passed her on to his brother. who, enraged, cut off her nose and ears.

33. (See note 32.)

42. Sweet, round balls made of milk, butter, sugar, nuts, and flavored with spices.

54. The lotus is the symbol of the blossoming world.

62. Lack of cleanliness in the physical and moral senses.

70. Disgraced and banished; this is a form of punishment meted to both men and women that we see in tales, especially tales whose provenance is southern India. The wrongdoer is seated on a donkey often facing the animal's tail, and chased out of the city gates. An added detail is sometimes present: the culprit's face is painted with black and red dots.

77. A deep, sunken navel is a mark of beauty in India; a protruding belly-button is not.

91. The phrase is rather obscure. Perhaps it means settling or cultivating.

103. Worship of the Kalpaka tree, that grants wishes.

122. Spring creeper, a variety of jasmine; it bears white, fragrant flowers.

126. Fortune pesonified.

133. Milk, melted butter, curds, urine, and dung; the cow is sacred.

143. The god of love, Kama, tried to tempt Lord Siva Himself, who was seated in single-minded meditation on Mt. Kailasa in the Himalayas. The Lord opened his Third Eye (the eye of wisdom and of visioning) and a spark flew out and burnt Kama to ashes. From that time, Love was known as the Bodiless.

150. A contemptuous word for the mouth.

151. Illusion, magic, sorcery.

(From The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie by Sivadasa. Penguin Classics edition, translated by Chandra Rajan.)