The Name of the Rose, A Review

     It has taken me a while to read this 502 page novel. Not because it is not interesting. It certainly is but Umberto Eco's passion for medieval history and language are very evident in this book. First off, like any Eco novel, it is well researched and the atmosphere feels authentic. You cannot fault him with any anachronisms or misinformation but he does go on a bit too long about the various heresies of the 13th and 14th centuries. However, some of this information is important to the back story of why William of Baskerville is at this Abbey in the mountains of northern Italy waiting for a delegation from the Pope when a young monk suddenly dies.
    The Abbot approaches William and asks him to investigate, although everyone believes it is a suicide, because William had been an Inquisitor for the Church at one time. William duly begins asking questions in the Scriptorum where the recently dead had worked and finds that there was indeed something mysterious about the young man's death. When another monk is found dead, soon after, it becomes clear that there is a murderer on the loose at the Abbey and William is engaged in a race against time to solve the murders before the Papal delegation arrives with the formidable and sinister Grand Inquisitor Bernard Gui at its head while the body count rises. Since the Abbot will not allow William to enter the Library, in the day or night, William must resort to stealth by night in the labyrinth of the Aedificium as it quickly becomes clear that the murders involve some forbidden book that is hidden in the library.
      The story is told from William's helper, the young novice Adso of Melk in the form of a memoir that Adso writes as he is nearing the end of his life. I recommend the book but, if anyone finds the discussions of medieval heresies or philosophy a bit wearying, they can easily be skipped over without losing anything essential to the story.

      Eco has written a nice introduction to the book, explaining his inspiration for the novel and he has also written a fairly lengthy postscript including a discussion of the source for the name.  He does not come out and say who or what is the 'Rose' of the title as he believes that, once the book is published, the reader is free to interpret the book as they see it. He writes that it is not the authors's job to tell the reader how to interpret the work and any interpretation could be equally valid. That being said, he does offer up the source for the Latin with which he ends the story: "stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." as I translate it, "The pristine rose stands rose by name, we hold the name as evident." It is indeed a mystery.

     It is an odd little line because, in the source that Eco names, De Contemptu Mundi by Bernard of Morlay, available here in the original latin, the line is "Nunc ubi Regulus aut ubi Romulus aut ubi Remus? Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." line 951-952.  "Where now is Regulus, or Romulus or Remus? The original Rome stands Rome by name, we understand the name."

In Book 1, line 177, there is a line about a rose "Tunc rosa sanguine, lilia virgine mente micabunt, gaudia maxima te pia lacrima te recreabunt." translated by me as "then, the lily gleams like the virgin mind, they recreate for you the great joy of your pious tear with the blood colored rose."

line 455 "Mox rosa fit rubus, ipseque cras pia, nunc rosa, cras fex." "Soon the rose will become red, Hereafter itself good, the rose is thereafter dregs."
line751 " O caro lactea, nunc rosa, postea sarcina vilis, flos tibi corruet et rose defluet haec iuvenilis....quid rosa? Foenum. " O milky flesh, now the rose, afterwards a burden of little value,the flower is corrupting to you and the rose proves unfaithful to the youthful of her......what is the rose? Hay."

The piece that Eco referred to is, in his own words, a variant on the ubi sunt theme. That is where have they gone?
It would be too easy to say the Rose is the girl who Adso meets in the kitchen one night and has sex with.  However the rose has so many meanings in medieval literature, one cannot be certain an event that was merely a footnote in a murder mystery was the most important event in the entire story that Adso tells about the Abbey. Perhaps it was the most important thing to Adso, but he never knows her name. The film with Sean Connery deviates a little from the book in the fate of the rose, although the novel is truer to what would have been her likely fate, which is more satisfying to a modern audience. Finally, I am not sure if Eco himself has a clear vision of who or what he meant the Rose to be.

The Honey Moon

I was watching a television show called "Museum Secrets" that showed some of the permanent collection from the Neues Museum in Berlin. My interest was piqued by the 'Berlin Gold Hat' pictured here, courtesy of Wiki Commons. The commentator stated that the hat was a solar/lunar calendar and was used in honey production to know when the solstice in June was near. It was stated that bees were affected by the full moon in June, this was when the hive would have maximum honey and this is why marriages are followed by the 'honey-moon' - maximum sweetness.

This put several questions in my mind which are challenging to resolve in a few hours of casual research.

Is the June full moon actually called the 'honey moon'? In some cultures, yes.

The solstice celebration is also the feast of St. John the Baptist. In spite of what some websites say, he is not the patron saint of bees. St. Ambrose is because of a story in the Legenda Aurea about a swarm of bees and that he also compared the church to a hive of bees.

When did people start having honeymoon trips? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of 'honeymoon' as the post marriage bliss was in 1546 in J. Heywood's book on proverbs in the English tongue and refers to the moon that is full but it doomed to wane like people's affections. The honeymoon did not come into style until the late 18th or early 19th century. Wikipedia is my source for saying that, as the British moved into India, the Indian custom of a post-marriage bridal tour became the fashion. There are no references to a honeymoon tour before 1821 in the OED.

The word 'honey' comes from the Germanic languages and is hunig or hunæg in Old English. There is no honey-month or honey-moon in the Anglo Saxon dictionaries. June was called Liða by the Venerable Bede.

From Bulletin 489, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, "It is possible that the custom of killing the bees and taking the honey in the full moon in June may result in a smaller amount being secured that if the killing were left until gathering had ceased in the fall."

When did it become the custom to have marriages in June? I am not sure. It is likely a modern invention because people got married any old time although, in the Middle Ages, high feasts seemed like a favorite time. As well, many people did not actually get formally married by a priest because many of the small villages lacked priests.

So you see, it is complicated. And so, I shall leave this with a quote from Brewer's Guide to Phrase and Fable: "a holiday spent together by a newly married couple. The word was originally used for the first month of marriage, although 'moon' does not mean the 'month' here, as sometimes supposed. The reference is to the moon as sweetness and is ironic, for no sooner is it full than it begins to wane." Indeed.

Wolf Hall, a Review

Here I am, late to the party, writing a review for a book when the sequel is already out. The subject matter is a popular one, especially following The Tudors series on television.

When any author writes a historical novel, the first question that must arise in any readers mind is how true to the events is it?I do not claim to be a Tudor scholar and know all the facts but it seems clear the author, Hilary Mantel, has chosen what to emphasize and what to downplay and thereby induce the reader to a certain point of view.

She appears to have stuck to the facts as well as we can know them. Of course the day to day lives of the participants has not been recorded and conversations must be surmised but I think she did a great job of bringing the characters to life and in keeping with the age that they lived. Mantel has chosen to portray Thomas More as a cold blooded villain and Cromwell a pragmatic humanist. While she has portrayed Anne as a sincere driving force behind the reform of the Church, she has also portrayed her as shrewish and conniving.

I feel a certain amount of pity for Anne. Her first engagement to Henry Percy was broken off by the married king who had designs on her for himself. She had already seen what being the king's mistress was like by witnessing what her sister, Mary, went through. Anne was already about 24 or 25 when the king had noticed her. It took seven years for the divorce from Henry's first wife to go forward. In the meantime Katherine was undiminished in her popularity, Anne was hated and there was threats against her life. By the time Henry married her, Anne was 32 or 33 and past her child bearing prime. How difficult must those years have been? As well as taking the place of a beloved monarch, she was a party to the break with the Church of Rome. After her fall, who would speak of her kindly? No one until her daughter became queen.

Was she as abrasive as she was made out to be? No doubt to some she was, she lived in rather trying circumstances. Was Cromwell the consummate civil servant dedicated to the process of reform? We know he became very wealthy under that reform. Not all the wealth of the monasteries made it into Henry's coffers. Was More the cold hearted Grand Inquisitor he was made out to be? In his lifetime, he denied torturing heretics and he is said to have educated all of the women in his household.

Cromwell is seen reading Cicero, with whom he shares a few characteristics. After all, they were both lawyers, 'new' men to the aristocracy, activists in their pursuit of the corrupt established order. Unlike Cicero, Cromwell was not afraid to take up the sword but, like Cicero, he will end with his head lopped of for running afoul of the powers that be. More reminds me of Cato the Younger for his ascetic sensibilities and his fearlessness in the face of death. Henry VIII could be likened to Theodoric the Great. He began as a great leader but devolved into paranoia and capriciousness, viewed as a heretic and responsible for the execution of a pope as well as a great man of letters Boethius. Theodoric, as well as Henry, had concubines, and left a daughter behind to rule which created instability in his realm. The War of the Roses having occurred so recently, was still firmly in everyone's memory and Henry was sincerely concerned with having the succession cinched with a son so as to not plunge the country into that sort of nightmare again.

After reading an interview with the author, I still find the choice of the title odd. After all, the novel begins with a chance meeting between the young More and Cromwell and ends with Cromwell orchestrating More's execution. In between that, is Henry's efforts to receive official sanction from Rome to marry Anne. The main thing preventing the annulling of the marriage to Katherine of Aragon was that her nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor and was holding the Pope hostage. This was one of the main arguments against bowing to the authority of Rome is that it was often loyal to a hostile prince.

That being said, following the break with Rome, the king and his archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, were excommunicated and by this act the king's palace effectively becomes a hall of 'wolves'. Wolf was another name for 'outlaw'. On page 531, when Cromwell became Master Secretary, he remembered Norfolk's words to Wolsey, during the cardinal's fall from grace, and he thought to himself 'homo homini lupus', which she translated as 'man is wolf to man'. Certainly people are preying upon other people throughout the novel.

The Wolf Hall of the title is not Cromwell's home, nor is it More's. It is not even a residence of Anne Boleyn but the home of the Seymours and does not ever even come into the tale except briefly as a rumour of some sort of scandal which had taken place there. Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife, flits in and out of the story as she was a lady in waiting to Queen Katherine and then Queen Anne. Mantel has Cromwell toy with the idea of making Jane his own wife, an astonishing suggestion for which I cannot truly say if she had any historical evidence. However this is a novel not a history.

In the interview with Peter Mares, she said that she ended the story with More's execution but Henry is planning his summer excursions and that he will end up at Wolf Hall. This does not take place in the story. In which case, perhaps the sequel should be called Wolf Hall but instead she resorted to the rather dubious title of 'Bring Up the Bodies' for it. Someone should assist her with the next title.

The Cluviel Dor

Instead of studying up for a Latin exam, I have been reading the entire series of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, aka Southern Vampire Series. It is a bit trashy but I like it anyway. Dead Reckoning ended in a bit of a cliffhanger, part of which was questions about the nature of the 'cluviel dor' that Sookie's fairy grandfather gave to her grandmother Adele.

It would be nice to have an idea what a 'cluviel dor' is but it has no precedent. In an interview, Charlaine Harris said she made up what she hoped would be a mysterious-sounding name for the gift. She has a BA in English and does not appear to have an fluency in other languages. I would bet some exposure to Creole but not to any Celtic languages( some online speculation is that it is something Gaelic. Sounds very French to me.) I also get the sense she is more influenced by popular culture than by ancient civilizations. There is another interview where she said she did little research:

Crescent Blues: What kind of research did you do for Dead Until Dark?

Charlaine Harris: Surprisingly little.

This is what we know about the 'cluviel dor' from the novel:

1. It is a fairy love gift.
2. Fintan wanted it given to Adele if he was dead
3. It can only be used once by the beloved.
4. It makes Sookie feel happy to touch it, like when she is with her grandfather but more intense.
5. You don't have to be a fairy to use it.
6. It was given to Adele before Sookie's aunt Linda had died of cancer.
7. It could have cured Linda's cancer.
8. It can change the world.
9. She can alter events in history by using it.
10. It takes a year to make one, so they are very difficult to prepare.
11. The wish has to be personal.
12. Sookie can't use it to take away the telepathy.
13. She can kill someone with it if they are directly threatening someone she loves.
14. Other fae would kill Sookie for the cluviel dor.

So, on with the speculation. 'Dor' could be either French for 'of gold' as in d'or or it could be 'door' but I doubt that. It is contains something of gold since it is a box of green that appears to open. The theories are that 'cluviel' is derived from Latin, clavis, that is 'a key' which is a good choice. I have also read 'viel' could be French for 'old' but it is really spelled wrong. 'Vie' is French for 'life' which has a possibility. 'Clue' does not just mean evidence in a mystery but it is a ball of thread, especially one that can lead one out of a labyrinth. 'Golden thread of life'? The Oxford English Dictionary states for one of many definitions that a 'clue' can be 'the thread of life which the Fates are fabled to spin and determine'. I think I will go with that.

Charlaine Harris has also said in her faqs that Sookie will never be a vampire, cannot be impregnated by a vampire.There is another quote on the forums on her site that 'once a vampire always a vampire'. It is not clear if it is Harris saying this or if someone is repeating something they heard her say.

Now for my thoughts on what it might be used for. My first thought was that it might be used to make Eric human. If the comment was correct, then that is not possible. Maybe it is in the phrasing. Perhaps she could use it to bring Eric back to life. There is a passage in Dead and Gone, chapter 15, where Sookie had a dream, "that night I dreamed of Eric. In my dream, he was human and we walked together under the sun. Oddly enough, he sold real estate." Would Eric give up being a vampire to be human with Sookie? He said, while he was under Hallow's spell that he would give up everything for her.

What else could it be used for? If Eric is not forced to marry a vampire queen and he and Sookie stay together, Sookie wants a child. The cluviel dor appears in the story just before Tara's baby shower. Everyone in Bon Temps is getting pregnant at this point. It is even mentioned to Sookie by Andy Bellefleur that it is time for Sookie but that she would not be having any babies if she keeps dating dead men and what would her grandmother think about that?

I wonder if the fairy gift, since it was given to Adele so late, may have been really intended for Sookie, who at the time was the only other one to have the 'essential spark'. Perhaps Sookie will use it to relieve her childlessness since Fintan had already helped Adele in that way. Maybe it will make Eric able, just once, to give her a child and, in true fairy fashion, she'll have twins.

It depends on who Sookie will end up with. Humans are too challenging because of her telepathy. I can't see her marrying a human. Alcide and Quinn have burned their bridges. In spite of everything Bill has done for Sookie, she won't forgive him for how they met. That leaves Sam, who has never been more than Sookie's friend and who is dating someone else, or Eric. Or someone new. There are only two books left so it might be late to introduce a new character. We shall see. Book 12 is written and due to be out in May, 2012.

Add: at the beginning of chapt. 7 Sookie had just received an email from Tara showing her baby bump.

"I took out the cluviel dor and held it to my chest. touching it seemed important, seemed to make it more vital. My skin warmed it quickly. Whatever lay at the heart of that smooth pale greenness seemed to quicken. I felt more alive too." Sounds like a baby.

The Sword of Roland

If you do not have a copy of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, you should buy one. It might be a little expensive but it is worth the price. It is one of the best reference books out there and I look in it all the time.

While looking up something else, my eye was caught by an entry on Roland's sword, which according to Brewer's is fabled to have once belonged to Hector, the prince of Troy. He acquired this fantastic sword from a Icelandic giant called Jutmundus from whom he also won his horn Oliphant which may have belonged to Alexander the Great but I do not know how Jutmundus acquired these treasures. The ogres from The Hobbit are now dancing around in the back of my mind. Inspiration? Probably.

This addition to the myth does not occur in The Song of Roland; it is probably from Orlando Furioso, a 16th century poem by Ludovico Ariosto. I do not own a copy of this book or its predecessor Orlando Innamorato but I do own a copy of The Illiad and I could not see what happened to Hector's sword when Achilles killed him. Presumably Achilles took it and Hector's armor since Hector's body was wrapped in cloth to be given back to his father. It could also have been the sword that Hector gave to Ajax and with which Ajax killed himself but Homer does not name this sword.

Brewer's also states that Durendal had been hurled into a poisonous stream to prevent it from falling in to unworthy hands but this differs from the account in The Song of Roland. There, Roland lays down to die with his sword underneath him and, when Charlemagne finds Roland's body, he gives the sword and the Oliphant to his men Rabel or Guineman but does not state who received which item.

Brewer's does offer a meaning for the name of Durendal: it states that the name probably comes from the Latin word "durare", that is "to last" or "endure". I like it.