{"id":140,"date":"2003-11-21T21:23:46","date_gmt":"2003-11-22T01:23:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/11\/21\/lost-antiquities-boo-hoo\/"},"modified":"2003-11-21T21:23:46","modified_gmt":"2003-11-22T01:23:46","slug":"lost-antiquities-boo-hoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/11\/21\/lost-antiquities-boo-hoo\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost Antiquities, Boo Hoo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a204'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Einhard on Charlemagne: &#8220;<i>Item barbara et antiquissima carmina, quibus veterum regum actus et bella canebantur, scripsit memoriaeque mandavit.<\/i>&#8221; [And he had the rough old songs, the Frankish epics of bygone kings and wars, written down so they would definitely never be forgotten, no matter what. -d]<\/p>\n<p>Those Frankish songs are all lost.  The antiquarian bemoans this &mdash; the lost masterpieces &mdash; the callous disregard for heritage &mdash; the guns cleaned, herrings wrapped, bindings shored up with unique pages from priceless manuscripts.  Take <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/04\/17#a9\">this chap<\/a> for an especially overwrought, hand-wringing example&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I feel with the antiquarian &mdash; there is a deep, abiding pain in the loss of the past.  But on the other hand, whaddya gonna do.  We&#8217;re bound to lose something or other.  And the gaps, wherever they are, give play to the imagination.   For instance, Tolkien wouldn&#8217;t have given us the riders of Rohan if he hadn&#8217;t shaped his mind with Germanic poetry and conceived a longing for the Goths (<i>singuli aut simul?<\/i>  ha ha).  Apart from some translation of the Bible or whatever &mdash; far from the manly Northern vigor that kept Germanicists of a century ago awake at night &mdash; we don&#8217;t have any Gothic writings.  This gave Tolkien a place to build up his ideal &mdash; to create stoic, moral, surprisingly hygienic people with nary a hint of human sacrifice.  No slaves.  No unseemly heathen worship practices.  No nuthin nasty, nor naughty.  Heck, they might as well be Christians!<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I get impatient with trying to write anything I think.  As a rule, my mind moves quickly to conclusions and images, skimming over all the middle stuff.  And when I do try to develop the middle matter, I get distracted by making jokes about beloved fantasy writers and their beloved horsemen.<\/p>\n<p>Anywho, on my walk from class to work this morning I entered a state of extreme equanimity about my beloved antiquities, wherein burning down the library of Alexandria seemed about as good as preserving it.  I can still see that endpoint of the thought process, but not in the flaming blaze of death-defying pyromaniac glory in which it first appeared.  It seems kind of scholastic and pointless.  I guess I probably wouldn&#8217;t burn that ol&#8217; library down after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Einhard on Charlemagne: &#8220;Item barbara et antiquissima carmina, quibus veterum regum actus et bella canebantur, scripsit memoriaeque mandavit.&#8221; [And he had the rough old songs, the Frankish epics of bygone kings and wars, written down so they would definitely never be forgotten, no matter what. -d] Those Frankish songs are all lost. The antiquarian bemoans [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}