I am backtracking to the Hivernian narrative although, in this section, Niall is in Britannia, at Maia, Bowness on the Solway Firth as opposed to Bowness on Windermere with which I am more familiar but which did not exist that far back. It is mentioned that weather is the domain of Mandanan maqq Leri. The Andersons' note explains that this sea god was later called Manannan mac Lir. This same Manannan is a character in Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword which also mentions the sunken city of Ys. "mac" means "son of." Lir, of course, is one of the Three of Ys. Poul Anderson's five Norse fantasies, starting with The Broken Sword, should be read after the The King of Ys Tetralogy; after them, Anderson's Norse historical fiction trilogy, The Last Viking, then his three novels of different genres set in the fourteenth century. Before Ys, there are three novels of different genres set BC. That makes a total of eighteen volumes set in historical or prehistorical pasts, plus enough short stories to fill a further volume. This is comparable to the seventeen or so volumes of his Technic Civilization future history series. There is nothing here that I have not said before. The subject recurs occasionally when we cite cross-references in Poul Anderson's works. I will follow Niall's narrative forward through Dahut and might also have to hark back to Volumes I and II.
10 comments:
As opposed to Bowness a suburb of Calgary which started as a separate village.
I always thought it was simply named after the Bow river which IIRC was so named because of the trees growing beside it which provided good wood for bows.
However, maybe like so many N. American places it was named after a British place.
Kaor, Paul!
I admit being more interested in Hadrian's Wall, it's design, construction, practical purposes, etc., than in Manannan! And what was Niall doing there in Britannia, anyway? Was he spying out the land, plotting raids on the Britannic provinces of the Empire?
Ad astra! Sean
Have to go out. Back later.
Kaor, Paul!
Understood.
Ad astra! Sean
NB: it was about this time that the Irish dialects of Celtic started acquiring the peculiarities we think of as characteristic of them.
In the earliest Ogham inscriptions, (dating to the 2nd century) the language is much closer to the Continental Celtic tongues and for that matter to Latin or Greek.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Considering how all these languages are of Indo-European origins, that is no surprise!
Ad astra! Sean
The similarities are probably why Latin almost completely supplanted the Continental Celtic languages and did so quickly; it was easy to learn one if you spoke the other.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That I had not known.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it's a matter of scholarly controversy, but there's substantial evidence that between Proto-Indo-European and the Italic and Celtic languages, there was a "proto-Italo-Celtic" stage.
The two families have a number of common developments prior to the split between Proto-Italic and Proto-Celtic.
And their -sound- systems were apparently quite similar down into the Classical period, as well as their syntax, and a lot of the vocabulary was very similar too.
Eg., here's the 1-10 numbers:
Gallic:
1 oino
2 -
3 tri
4 petru
5 pempe
6 suex
7 sextan
8 oxtu
9 na
10 decan
Latin:
1 ūnus
2 duo
3 trēs
4 quattuor
5 quīnque
6 sex
7 septem
8 octō
9 novem
10 decem
As you can see, they're very similar. The same holds for ordinary terminology.
For example, "big horn" in early Celtic would be "magjo kornu", and in Latin it's "magnus cornu".
It would be about as difficult for a Gallic speaker to learn Latin as it would be for an Italian speaker today to learn Romanian.
Not easy, but much, much easier than learning an unrelated language.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I saw the resemblances at once. And the differences would be signs of how proto-Celtic and proto-Italic were splitting off from each other.
Ad astra! Sean
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