Tauroctony……Gerard Manley Hopkins….The Ice Queen…..
by Bernie Bell - 07:53 on 07 December 2022
Tauroctony……
Kenny Brophy (aka The Urban Pre-historian) writes very interesting pieces about all kinds of things….this one particularly caught my attention…….
https://theurbanprehistorian.wordpress.com/2022/12/05/tauroctony/
Kenny’s tale is fascinating – fascinating archaeology and also about the power of corporate money – including how corporate money has realised that it needs to show a better face these days - though I suspect that they mostly get away with what they can get away with.
I won’t go off on one about that – I will, however, add my tuppenceworth about bulls & Mithras…
Bull
(Written after reading ‘Skara – The Fourth Wave’ by Andrew Appleby)
Bull – on the walls of caves.
Bull – in His glory at Knossos.
Bull – brought to Britain
In the Mithras cult
From Rome.
Bull – in Alan Garner’s ‘Thursbitch’ –
“Bull can bide, while folk forget.”
Are we remembering?
And Bull – Dances.
BB
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Gerard Manley Hopkins….
I’ve been involved in a discussion on Bartholomew Barker’s blog about Gerard Manley Hopkins, prompted by Bart’s predilection for visiting the graves of dead poets …. https://bartbarkerpoet.com/2022/12/03/the-grave-of-gerard-manley-hopkins/
I posted a link to ‘Inversnaid’, and will now post the whole poem here as it’s so fitting to the time of year and the time of ‘man’….
Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
And then, I went back to Tove Jansson’s ‘Tales From Moomin Valley’ where I read….
“The brook was a good one.
It went rushing clear and brown over wads of last year’s leaves, through small tunnels of left-over ice, swerving through the green moss and throwing itself headlong down a small waterfall on to a white sand bottom. In places it droned sharp as a mosquito, then it tried to sound great and menacing, stopped, gurgled with a mouthful of melted snow, and laughed at it all.”
I believe there to be no such thing as coincidence.
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In ‘Tales From Moomin Valley’ the chapter entitled ‘The Hemulen who loved Silence’ reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Selfish Giant’. Not quite the same – but similar in theme.
I hadn’t thought of Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories for a very long time – and I think I’ll return to them as kindly tales in an un-kind time.
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The Ice Queen….
Looking at the weather, and the weather forecast – do you remember the ‘Beast From The East’ in 2018? Pete the Blacksmith made an Ice Queen…….
And he told me how he did it….. “Steel frame skinned with industrial cling film, sprayed with fine water mist at sub zero temperatures over night. Ice then carries own weight.”
He’s a clever bloke….. https://www.facebook.com/people/Bluefoot-Blacksmithing-Courses/100054502867979/
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Here’s one I made earlier….. https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/01/04/time-travel-in-tankerness-house/
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