Lughnasa Full Honey Extraction Moon
Over the last week plus I’ve watched the Starz Network version of the King Arthur legends, Camelot. I get it streaming from Netflix. Each time I watch this program I get a shot of creative juices, similar to the ones I got when I first read the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Those didn’t inspire me to write about the King Arthur material, an area that gets reworked a lot, but it did cause me to think about my own heritage, my ethnic heritage and what might be there as a resource for writing.
At the time I chose to emphasize the Celtic aspects of my bloodline, Welsh in the instance of the Ellis line and Irish through the Correll’s, my father’s father’s mother’s family. The Celts have a rich pool of legends, religious ideas and quasi-historical accounts. Most have heard at least something about druids and faeries, both part of the Celtic past. There are, too, holy wells, a Celtic pantheon and the series of holidays known as the Great Wheel which I celebrate.
I’ve not done much with the German side of my heritage though it is, arguably, more substantial since the Zikes and the Spitlers, my mother’s and father’s mother’s families respectively are both German. The Keatons, my mother’s father’s family, we think have an English connection though it’s proven difficult to track down.
The legendary and religious aspects of the ancient Celts and Germans are what interest me, the more recent history not so much and by recent I mean from the Renaissance forward.
Roman and Greek mythology and legend has also fascinated me since I was young and my Aunt Barbara gave me a copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology. Through out my life at various points I’ve read such works as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, amazed at the richness of these stories.
As you know, if you read this blog with any regularity, that lead me to learn Latin, which I am doing, so I could translate Ovid’s great work, the Metamorphoses, for myself. The distance between a translated text and its English version has interested me especially since seminary. In seminary I studied both the Old and New Testaments extensively, learning in the process many techniques for analyzing ancient texts. It was my favorite part of the seminary curriculum.
When I observed yesterday to Greg, my Latin tutor, that the commentaries I’d found for the Metamorphose lacked a lot compared to commentaries for the Biblical material, he challenged me. “Well,” he said, “You could write a commentary to it.” I might just be able to do that.
When I mentioned it to Kate, she said, “Oh, and finish your novels, too?” And she’s right of course. I have more than one creative iron in the fire, plus other matters related to art and the environment.
Even so, the idea intrigues me. A lot. Now all I have to do is get very facile at translating.
501 Latin verbs fully conjugated. Once I begin to learn Latin and could see more learning ahead, I purchased the OLD, the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which is the gold standard of Latin-English works. Thanks to Amazon I got one for a very good price.
bookshelves are full and many have books piled on top of them. Each one I want to read. Some I want to use only as reference, but most I want to read cover to cover. The books range in topic from fairy tales and folklore to basic scientific texts on biology and geology, from philosophy to theology, art history to renaissance life, china, japan, india and cambodia to single dictionaries and the multiple volumes of the OED and the Dictionary of Art. Of course there is fiction, too, and poetry, works on historiography and works on the enlightenment. This doesn’t count the 90 books I now have on my kindle, many fiction, but many non-fiction, too.
include the histories of Herodotus and substantial commentary. The Mahabharata. Several works on Asia art. A cabinet full of books on the enlightenment and liberalism. Another cabinet full on calendars and holidays. I will never do it. Why? Because I do have interests, obsessions maybe, that take me out into the garden or over to the State Capitol and the Minnesota Institute of Arts, the homes of the Woolly Mammoths and our children. Kate and I will, I imagine, resume at least some of our SPCO attending when she retires and there will be travel, too.