Hallo conlangers!

On 06/05/2017 20:43 R A Brown wrote:

> As some may recall I moved house at the end of September.
> Because we plan to have some alterations made, quite a bit
> of my stuff is still in boxes, waiting to be unpacked!  One
> these was Umberto Eco's "The Book of Legendary Lands."  In
> view of this thread, I searched for it this afternoon and
> found it  :)
>
> I put greater trust in its treatment of these legendary
> lands than I do in Wikipedia's.

Fair. Wikipedia is sometimes wrong (see the article on Eteocretan we
corrected a few years ago), and it is unwise to use it as the sole
source. But professionally edited works can also be wrong, and it is
always wise to consult as many sources as possible.

>
> So:
>
> On 06/05/2017 16:48, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>> Hallo conlangers!
>>
>> [...]
>> Certainly, the Atlantis story can't have happened the
>> way Plato tells it,
>
> Why should it?  Plato uses 'mythoi' to illustrate points;
> one of best known, I guess, is the mythos of the cave which
> occurs in 'The Republic'(514a–520a).  No one supposes that
> there actually was such a cave inhabited by such prisoners.

Right. Some people claim that Plato said that it was a "true story", but
it is actually one of his *characters* who says that, which of course
doesn't really mean anything. Lots of tales are called "true" by
characters in fiction.

> I note Eco treats Atlantis in the same chapter as the
> legendary Mu and Lemuria.

And rightly so. Lemuria started as a scientific hypothesis by which some
biologists tried to explain how the lemurs (small monkey-like animals)
made it to Madagascar; it would soon have been forgotten if it had not
been for Ernst Haeckel (one of the founding fathers of evolutionary
biology, but even the greatest minds sometimes have bad ideas) who
hypothesized that the cradle of humanity may have stood on this lost
continent, which was where esoteric cranks and pulp fantasy writers
picked up the concept.

Science has meanwhile abandoned the idea, but that doesn't deter
crackpots and fantasy fans from continuing to play with it.

Mu is the invention of a crackpot (Augustus Le Plongeon) popularized by
another crackpot (James Churchward). None of the three "lost continents"
ever existed. This, of course, is no reason not to make conlangs of them ;)

> [snip]
>
>>>> though Plato may have woven parts of true stories
>>>> into his fabric that he had picked up in various
>>>> places. He perhaps took the geography from
>>>> Hyperborea/Britain,
>>>
>>> Not the hyperboreans about whom there are at least as
>>> many theories, ranging from sort of plausible to
>>> outright crankiness!    :(
>>>
>>> The identification of hyperborea with Britain is, I
>>> think, first made by Hekataios of Abdera in the 4th
>>> cent BC,
>
> Misled by Wikipedia.  On checking, Hekataios merely says it
> is an island in the ocean "no smaller than Sicily in size",
> from which it is possible to see the moon close up.

I once read (in a secondary source, namely a compendium of fictional
places named "From Atlantis to Utopia") that Hyperborea was meant to lie
"opposite the land of the Celts", and a round temple of Apollo is
mentioned which may be Stonehenge. (Of course, there is quite some nutty
stuff in circulation about Stonehenge, too!) But you can't see the Moon
closer up from Britain than from anywhere else on Earth, of course.

> By 'ocean' he means the sea beyond the Med on the other side
> of the 'Pillars of Herakles', i.e. straights of Gibraltar -
> namely, the Atlantic Ocean.  But there are other islands in
> the Atlantic larger than Sicily besides Britain, such as
> Ireland and Iceland.  But from none of these can you see the
> close up.

Sure.

> Eco deals with Hyperborea in the same chapter as Thule
> which, according to the Greek explorer Pytheas, is in the
> north Atlantic and is a land of fire and ice in which the
> sun never sets.  It sounds to me remarkably like Iceland in
> mid-summer   :)

Yep. "Land of fire and ice" characterizes Iceland very well. And the Sun
only very briefly dips below the horizon there in summer (it *does* dip,
as the island lies just south of the Arctic Circle, but barely so),
without anything that deserves the name "night".

> But Eco deals with Thule and the hyperboreans in the same
> chapter mainly because the two legends/myths became bound up
> with one another among the ancients.  I had forgotten that
> Hyperborea figured in Nazi occultism as the birthday of what
> they considered to be the "Aryan Race."

Thule and Hyperborea are indeed often identified with each other, after
all, they are both mythological countries in the far north. But it is
all buttocks. As for the "Aryan Race", this is again an abandoned
scholarly concept (that the Indo-European languages descend from
Sanskrit, which has _arya_ as the designation for its own speakers; and
that language families coincide with "races") adopted and carried on by
crackpots - dangerous crackpots in this case.

> But with the best will in the world I find nothing in Eco's
> book to suggest that Hyperbrea was Britain.

OK. The idea that Hyperborea was Britain is just a fanciful *modern*
interpretation of some ancient Greek writings like my idea that the
geography of Plato's Atlantis may be based on Britain.

>> Fair. Atlantis is no more real than Middle-earth, Narnia
>> or the Ringworld. It's just the fanciful invention of a
>> single author. Hyperborea is just as unreal, though its
>> authorship is unknown.
>
> Agreed.

And that makes all localization hypotheses pretty pointless. After all,
nobody seriously claims to have found Narnia or The Shire anywhere in
the real world.

>>> In my view, to look for echoes of factual history in
>>> Plato's Atlantis mythos is about as valuable as
>>> looking for echoes of actual history in Middle Earth
>>> and in Narnia.
>>
>> I understand. There are of course people who consider
>> such endeavours interesting, and I don't think such
>> discussions are utterly out of place here.
>
> I'm sure some people do find these things interesting and I
> suspect there are lists somewhere on the Internet where such
> things are discussed.

Surely there are (though I don't know them); but that's not really my
kind of game. I don't seriously believe Atlantis or Hyperborea to be
real, nor that there really was a sophisticated civilization in
prehistoric Britain. My Elves are *fictional*, even if they are placed
in a real-world location. We have no archaeological evidence of them!

> But I think solid fact and caution
> are needed, lest legends get abused for political, religious
> or racist reasons.

Such reasons are often readily apparent in localization hypotheses. A
northern German parson named Jürgen Spanuth, for instance, once located
Atlantis in northern Germany, with the capital at Heligoland. Clearly
local patriotism run amok! Also, he published his hypothesis with a
notoriously right-wing publishing company.

>
> Tread with caution - there be dragons there   :)

Certainly!

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1