The Last Three
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A Voyage to Arcturus
Today’s release: David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus. It’s a rather odd book which I first heard of via C. S. Lewis. I’ll let him tell you about it (these are from his collected letters):
To Arthur Greeves on 26 Dec 1934:
I wish you had told me a little more about Voyage to Arcturus. Even if you can’t describe it, you could at least give me some idea what it is about: at least whether it is about a voyage to Arcturus or not. I haven’t come across the book yet, but will certainly read it if I do.
To Arthur Greeves on 7 Dec 1935:
I have tried in vain to buy Voyage to Arcturus but it is out of print.
To Roger Lancelyn Green on 28 Dec 1938:
You are obviously much better informed than I about this type of literature and the only one I can add to your list is Voyage to Arcturus by David Lyndsay (Methuen) wh. is out of print but a good bookseller will prob. get you a copy for about 5 to 6 shillings. It is entirely on the imaginative and not at all on the scientific wing.
To Eliza Marian Butler on 18 Aug 1940:
If you don’t know David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (Methuen. Out of print, but not hard to get) you might find it very interesting. It is mere ‘popular’ fiction, but this kind of writing (like religion on the one hand and pornography on the other) cuts across the ordinary stratifications.
To E. R. Eddison on 19 Dec 1942 (apparently Lewis and Eddison wrote this way to each other, and yes, the macrons are supposed to look like that):
Mary, as for yo¯ hono¯s metaphysick mistresses, beatificall bona robas, hyper-uranian whoores, and transcendentall trulls, not oonlie my complexioun little delighteth in them but my ripe and more constant ivdgement reiecteth, esteeming them in truth no more but what Geo: Macdonald bringeth us in as Lilith in his nobly inuented but ill-languaged romans of the same name, or David Lyndesay of late, under the name Sullenbode, in his notable Voiage and Travell to Arctur¯.
To Charles A. Brady on 29 Oct 1944:
Space-and-time fiction: but oddly enough not Rice-Burroughs. But this is probably a mere chance and the guess was a sound one. The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, which you also will revel in if you don’t know it. I had grown up on Well’s stories of that kind: it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the ‘scientifiction’ appeal could be combined with the ‘supernatural’ appeal — suggested the ‘Cross’ (in biological sense). His own spiritual outlook is detestable, almost diabolist I think, and his style crude: but he showed me what a bang you cd. get from mixing these two elements.
To Ruth Pitter on 4 Jan 1947:
No, I have yet another humiliation to undergo. Can you bear the truth? — Voyage to Arcturus is not the parody of Perelandra but its father. It was published, a dead failure, about 25 years ago. Now that the author is dead it is suddenly leaping into fame: but I’m one of the old guard who had a treasured second hand copy before anyone had heard of it. From Lyndsay I first learned what other planets in fiction are really good for: for spiritual adventures. Only they can satisfy the craving which sends our imaginations off the earth. Or putting it another way, in him I first saw the terrific results produced by the union of two kinds of fiction hitherto kept apart: the Novalis, G. Macdonald, James Stephens sort and the H. G. Wells, Jules Verne sort. My debt to him is very great: tho’ I’m a little alarmed to find it so obvious that the affinity came through to you even from a talk about Lyndsay!
For the rest, Voyage to A is on the borderline of the diabolical: i.e. the philosophy expressed is so Manichaean as to be almost Satanic. Secondly, the style is often laughably crude. Thirdly, the proper names (Polecrab, Blodsombre, Wombflash, Tydomin, Sullenbode) are superb and perhaps Screwtape owes something to them. Fourthly, you must read it. You will have a disquieting but not-to-be-missed experience.
To William Kinter on 28 Mar 1953:
My real model was David Lyndsay’s Voyage to Arcturus wh. first suggested to me that the form of ‘science fiction’ cd. be filled by spiritual experiences.
To Joy Gresham on 22 Dec 1953:
As far as I can remember you were non-committal about Childhood’s End: I suppose you were afraid that you might raise my expectations too high and lead to disappointment. If that was your aim, it has succeeded, for I came to it expecting nothing in particular and have been thoroughly bowled over. It is quite out of range of the common space-and-time writers; away up near Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and Wells’s First Men in the Moon. It is better than any of Stapleton’s. It hasn’t got Ray Bradbury’s delicacy, but then it has ten times his emotional power, and far more mythopoeia.
To Ruth Pitter on 9 Jul 1956:
Thank you for the Voyage returned. I felt pretty sure you couldn’t think it vulgar once you read it: diabolical, mad, childishly ill-written in places — almost anything you like rather than vulgar.
To Alan Hindle on 31 Jan 1960:
Voyage to Arcturus was reprinted by Messrs Faber and Faber within the last 20 years. The original edition (I forget who published it) is still sometimes obtainable. Rogers of Newcastle on Tyne is quite as good a bookseller for hunting out old books as any London or Oxford firm, and usually charges less. The author, David Lindsay, is dead. If you get the book, I shd. think twice before introducing it to the young. It is very strong meat indeed and the philosophy behind it is that of Schopenhauer or the Manichaeans. A youngster unless in perfect psychological health (and what youngster is?) cd. damage himself with it a good deal.
To Robin Anstey on 2 Nov 1960:
You probably know David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (Faber)? If not, don’t overlook it. This is the fullest example of what I mean — tho’ the message he is putting over is a v. horrible one — Schopenhauer if not Manes himself.
To Joan Lancaster on 27 Mar 1963:
So you are, like me, in love with syllables? Good. Sheldar is a boss word. So are Tolkien’s Tinuviel and Silmaril. And David Lindsay’s Tormance in Voyage to Arcturus. And Northumberland is glorious; but best of all, if only it meant something more interesting, is silver salver.
To Father Peter Milward SJ on 27 Jun 1963:
My stories were not influenced by any of the authors you mention. The first impulse came, I believe, from H. G. Wells. More important was David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus.
To Joan Lancaster on 11 Jul 1963:
I think the poetry is developing alright. You’ll be enchanted with imaginary names for a bit and probably go too far, but that will do you no harm. Like having had measles. I don’t think Joyce is as good at them as David Lindsay (Voyage to Arcturus) or E. R. Eddison in The Worm Ouroboros.
A Voyage to Arcturus is available to download in EPUB or Kindle formats.
Ordinance tracker WIP
A while ago I said I was going to post more in-progress stuff, but I haven’t really done that. So, here’s one of my current projects (click for the full image):
It’s a little app (currently just a mockup) that helps you track LDS temple ordinance work. With my own family history work, I’ve found that it’s a bit of a pain trying to remember which sealings I can do and which I’m waiting on the endowments for. I’d rather let the computer do that. So, the idea with this app is that it’s smart enough to keep track of the relationship between people (children and parents, spouses) and know which ordinances you can do and which you’re still waiting on. (I haven’t mocked this up yet, but in the Sealings column, there’ll be a ghosted area for sealings waiting on other ordinances.)
The other use case is that when you’re about to go to the temple, it makes it easy to see at a glance what cards are ready for whatever ordinance you’re planning on doing. “I’m doing initiatories, okay, here are the cards I need to take with me.” That kind of thing.
I’m also planning to include a stats page so you can see how many ordinances you’ve done each month (separated out by type) and get a list of all the people you’ve done the work for.
Progress-wise, I’ve got the design roughly where I want it (with polishing still left), so I’m just figuring out the backend logic and planning out the code.
Orthodoxy
Three years after G. K. Chesterton published Heretics, he wrote Orthodoxy. It’s a great book, including one of my favorite Chesterton pieces, “The Ethics of Elfland.”
As for why he wrote a second book (it’s sort of a sequel to Heretics), he explains why in the preface:
This book is meant to be a companion to Heretics, and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called Heretics because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical…. It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer’s own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology.
As usual, it’s available to download in EPUB or Kindle formats.
Jane Eyre EPUB/Kindle
Today’s release: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, available in EPUB and Kindle formats. It’s been a favorite of mine since the first time I read it years ago, and I’ve wanted to make a nice ebook edition of it for a while now. Enjoy.
(If you’re wondering why I make my own editions of books that already have plenty of ebook editions available, it’s mainly because bookmaking is fun. And I don’t really like the other freely available ebook editions of Jane Eyre.)
Elias
Alrighty, after a much-too-long wait, we’ve got a new Mormon Texts Project release for y’all: Orson F. Whitney’s epic poem Elias: An Epic of the Ages. It’s on Project Gutenberg and available in EPUB and Kindle as well.
Formatting poetry ebooks takes a lot more work than prose. Especially when Whitney changes indentation styles almost every canto. Sigh. (Not to mention the psycho line numbering — see the book page for a rundown on the madness therein.) Regular expressions helped, but it was still a beast.
Anyway, now that that’s out of the way (phew), we’ll be getting back to a more frequent release schedule. I’m finalizing Essentials in Church History (which is über-long but fairly straightforward, formatting-wise) and working on the backlog for EPUB/Kindle conversions (about halfway done with Life of Heber C. Kimball, which is the longest of the books in the backlog), and we’re planning to have Hephzibah and My First Mission finished with proofing by the end of the month (with releases shortly thereafter).
Heretics
I’ve wanted to get back into reading G. K. Chesterton, but I wasn’t very happy with any of the EPUB editions of Heretics out there, so I’ve made my own. Since, um, that’s what I do. At least with public domain books.
Anyway, head on over to the book page to download it in EPUB or Kindle formats.
I should also add that this is my first release in a new category, Inklings. Many of the Inklings’ books are still under copyright (C.S. Lewis only has Spirits in Bondage in the public domain, for example), but there are still authors and books that influenced them or that they mentioned in essays or letters, and that’s what I’ll be publishing in that category — G. K. Chesterton’s works, George MacDonald’s works, A Voyage to Arcturus, The Worm Ouroboros, etc. Basically, anything related to the Inklings that’s in the public domain.
Title etymologies
I thought it’d be fun to go through some titles and look at the histories behind the words (since I seem to be on an etymology kick lately). We’ll start with royalty and then do the Mr./Mrs./etc. group.
King
It’s a common Germanic word, from the Old English form cyning. Not much beyond that other than that it’s somehow related to kin “race, tribe” (Old English cynn) — so a king was, by extension, a “leader of a tribe.” That connection is dubious but it’s the main theory right now.
Oh, and king is of course related to modern German könig.
Queen
Another Germanic word, seen in Old English as cwen along with a bunch of other forms over the years (cwene, kuen, quyene, qwyn, quewne, queine, and quin being just a few, all from the Middle English period when people exhibited the most creativity in spelling I’ve ever seen).
Cwen came from Proto-Indo-European *gwen- (“woman, wife”), akin to Greek γυνή (“woman, wife”), whence we get words like gynecology and misogyny.
Lord
From the Old English word hláford, which came from hláfweard. That’s a compound word made up of hláf (“load, bread”) and weard (“keeper”, related to our modern warden and, through French, guard). So it basically meant the breadwinner. That meaning extended to mean a master or ruler, and thence to mean God. (But in Old English they usually used Drihten where we would use Lord.)
Sometime during the Middle English period the word simplified from hláford to just lord.
Lady
From the Old English word hlǣfdige, a merger of hláf (“loaf”) and *dīge (“kneader”). The latter isn’t attested elsewhere.
As I was poking around the entries on lady, I found an interesting bit about the word ladybug, by the way. Back in Old English, Hlǣfdige (“Lady”) referred to the Virgin Mary, and its genitive singular form hlæfdigan was often combined with names of other things (plants, etc.) to create “Our Lady’s [plant, etc.]” forms. And thus ladybug means “Our Lady’s bug.” In German they call the ladybug Die Marienkäfer (Mary, obviously), and in the U.K. and elsewhere they refer to it as ladybird.
Duke
From Middle English duc, which is from the Latin word dux (“leader, commander”) via French. Dux comes from duco (“to lead, draw”), and that’s where we get words like deduce, produce, conduct, and seduction (“to draw to oneself”), not to mention educate and the ever-awesome duct tape.
Duchess
From French duchesse, from Latin ducissa (and thence from dux, as with duke, with the feminine -issa ending which we’ll see again in a moment with mistress).
Earl
From the Old English word eorl (“brave man, warrior, leader, chief”). The opposite is ceorl (“churl”), which originally just meant a man without rank.
Baron
From Early Middle English barun, from Old French barun, from late Latin baro, baronem, which originally just meant “man.”
Vizier
From Turkish vezīr, which came from the Arabic word wazīr (وزير, originally “porter,” and from there it came to mean “one who bears the burden of government”). And wazīr came from wazara (وزر, third person singular past tense, “he carried”).
Thanks to Andrew Heiss for the Arabic script here.
It’s fascinating, by the way, how most of these titles evolved from words with comparatively low origins.
Mr.
Shortened form of master and, later, mister. The usual plural is Messrs. (since Mrs. would be confusing to say the least), from French messieurs (plural of monsieur).
Whence master? Latin magister (“master”), with some influence by French words like maître.
Magister comes from the root mag (“great”), where we get the Magna Carta and, also through French (I’m sensing a theme here), Charlemagne. Mag also gives us words like major (“greater”) and majesty.
And of course there’s a Greek equivalent: mag is related to the Greek prefix μεγα-, also meaning “great” or “big,” and that’s where we get words like megabyte and megalomania.
For the heck of it I looked up magic, by the way, and found that it’s from Latin magicus from the Greek μάγος (“member of the Median caste of priests, Magus,” where we get the three Magi). It’s originally from the Old Persian word Maguš, also referring to the Median priests. I think I need to learn more about these priests.
Mrs.
Shortened version of mistress. The plural is Mmes. (from the French mesdames, plural of madame).
Mistress came from master with the -ess suffix (which came from Latin -issa and from Greek -ισσα).
Miss
A shortened version of mistress. When it was first used in the early 1600s, it meant “a kept woman, a concubine.” Towards the end of the 1600s it took on its current, more pleasant meaning, as a title for an unmarried woman or girl.
Ms.
This one didn’t pop up till 1901. As you could have guessed, it’s a merger of Mrs. and Miss as a way to refer to a woman without having to specify her marital status.
Sir
A shortened form of sire, with “the shortening being due to the absence of stress before the following name or appellation.” “Sir Lancelot” rolls off the tongue more easily than “Sire Lancelot,” basically.
Sire comes from Latin senior (“older,” the comparative form of senex, “old”). We also get senile and senator from senex. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from that.
Ma’am
Shortened from madam, from the Old French madame (ma “my” + dame “lady”, similar to Italian’s madonna and Latin’s mea domina).
Speaking of domina and its masculine form dominus, they come from the root dam, dom, which means “to tame, subdue.” Domain and dominion come from this root.
With that meaning of “tame,” you’d think that domesticate was another grandchild word, but it’s actually from another root, dam, dom (yes, it looks the same), which means “to build.” That’s where we get domicile (via Latin domus “house”).
Cadets and cephaloids
I was browsing through the OED the other day and came across the entry for cadet. Turns out it originally meant a younger son or brother (particularly the youngest son). It also came to mean “a gentleman who entered the army without a commission, to learn the military profession and find a career for himself (as was regularly done by the younger sons of the French nobility before the Revolution),” and, finally, “a student in a military or naval college,” which is how it’s mainly used today. (I should add that in New Zealand it’s used to refer to a young man learning sheep-farming on a sheep-station. Not quite military but still cool.)
Etymology
Cadet comes from the French cadet (surprising, I know), which comes from the Provençal word capdet, which itself is from the diminutive of the Latin caput (“head”). So it meant “little chief,” or the “inferior head of a family.”
As for the history of caput, it’s related to the Greek κεϕαλή (also meaning “head”), which is where we get words like hypocephalus (as in the Book of Abraham — “under the head”) and encephalitis (ἐγκέϕαλος means “brain,” with the -itis “disease” suffix).
You also get cool words like bicephalous (“two-headed”), cebocephalic (“monkey-headed”), cephalalgy (fancy word for “headache”), cynocephalus (“one of a fabled race of men with dogs’ heads”), ophiocephale (“serpent-headed”), and pachycephalic (“having a very thick skull,” and yes, it also means “thick-headed” and “stupid”). And pachycephalic may remind you of pachyderm (“thick-skinned”), which we use to refer to animals like elephants, rhinos, and hippos.
Getting back to caput, its Latin relatives include capillaris (“of or pertaining to the hair”), Capitolium (the Roman Capitol), praeceps (“headlong, steep,” whence we get precipice), and biceps (“two-headed” or “divided into two parts”).
Javascript name box
In genealogy web apps, I kind of like consolidating name fields into a single textbox. Simpler is better. But then you run into the problem of distinguishing the surname from the rest of the name — because of surnames like “Gutierrez Sanchez,” you can’t just assume the surname is the last word in the string.
I’ve been thinking for a while about a clean way to deal with this (as well as giving a nice visual indication of the surname instead of just slashes), and here’s what I’ve got so far, which I’m dubbing (rather unimaginatively) the Javascript name box:
When you click on the name, it becomes editable:
How it works
Basically, you give it an input.namebox element and it creates a corresponding div tag for displaying the highlighted surname. It then flips back and forth between the input and the div, parsing the name field and changing the highlight appropriately.