Hi from my little hole... Hope you don't mind some bandwidth from the
"pleb" sector, but I thought these tidbits might be of some sort of use
to someone.
(Couldn't sort out who wrote...)
> Yes, it was apparently his White Goddess stuff which tarnished his reputation
> in scholarly quarters (except, wasn't it published later??), though the
> theme is laid out in a much more detailed (albeit somewhat less focused) fashion
> in The Greek Myths.
Seems I remember from when I waded through TWG (voluntarily, no less!?)
that Graves in his own intro to it said his work for that book
(especially the ogham "tree calendar" thing that he "solved" from an old
poem) was done using something like "poetic 'memory'" (he had some Big
Word for it) - meaning he "went back and 'remembered'" information from
before his time, using his imagination. He clearly says somewhere in
there that he *isn't* using the scholarly technique he used in his other
work. Also in that intro, he literally apologizes for writing the
book! (This may be a later printing after the academic response to it)
Yews...
> The reference is in Grigson's _An Englishman's Flora_, London, 1960
> (1958). Grigson also says that the tradition that sitting or sleeping
> under the shade of a yew tree was potentially fatal dates back to
> Dioscorides.
This came from a source on Norse type magic - "pop" stuff, but I think
the author researched it pretty carefully. I can try to dig the book up
and track down the author's sources if anyone's interested:
Vitkr (sp?) [rune magicians] and/or "berserkers" are said to have slept
under yew trees on warm days to get "visions". If the source of this is
reliable, it may point to previous or parallel European traditions on
yew trees - no doubt added to from the Greek stuff the Vikings/traders
would have picked up in their travels, as the three "norns" (Fates) are
thought to have been (there is only one in the earlier Teutonic
material, apparently).
Heather Law
(one of the nonacademic types who is thankful that you folks run this
list "open" to us dedicated amateurs)
"The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the author"
-anonymous
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