I had planned to take a class on Chaucer at my local college in the spring of 2023 but that didn’t work out for a number of reasons. To soothe my disappointment spent the time reading some of his poetry as well as various things about Chaucer and his poetry. One day I was listening to a lecture by Seth Lerer and he mentioned something I’ve never heard before about medieval reading habits. He said that people used to pick up a book they were about to read with the left hand, then open the back cover with the right hand and read the last few lines there. Then they’d flip to the front of the book and start reading from the beginning.

In an age when a large part of story-telling was retelling older stories, no one worried about spoilers. Homer and Virgil both begin their epics by telling the reader how the story is going to end.

Knowing this habit, medieval authors were fairly deliberate about the final lines of their stories, which makes for some interesting features. The last lines of The Canterbury Tales are this inscription:

HERE IS ENDED THE BOOK OF THE TALES OF CAUNTERBURY COMPILED BY GEFFREY CHAUCER, OF WHOS SOULE JHESU CRIST HAVE MERCY, AMEN.

The reader would then flip to the front and begin reading the Prologue.

Curious, I flipped through some of my older books to remind myself how they ended. Most of them let you know what kind of story you’ll be reading, whether it has a happy or sad ending. A few allude to the beginning of the story.

One that caught my attention was the ending of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso:

And lifting his victorious hand on hie,
In that Turks face he stabd his dagger twise
Up to the hilts, and quickly made him die,
And rid himselfe of trouble in a trice:
Downe to the lake, where damned ghosts do lie,
Sunke his disdainfull soule, now cold as Ise,
Blaspheming as it went, and cursing lowd,
That was on earth so loftie and so proud.
(tr. Sir John Harington)

This is almost exactly the way The Aeneid ends:

In the same breath, blazing with wrath he plants
his iron sword hilt-deep in his enemy’s heart.
Turnus’ limbs went limp in the chill of death.
His life breath fled with a groan of outrage
down to the shades below.
(tr. Robert Fagles)

Which brings me back to my earlier point about there being no spoilers in ancient and medieval literature.

And even if a reader didn’t look at the end before beginning, each book of Orlando Furioso opens with an “Argument,” a few lines that tell the reader what will happen in that book. Each canto of Spenser’s Faerie Queene also begins this way.

[I originally wrote this post last winter and don’t remember why I only saved it as a draft and didn’t publish is. Life has been crazy this year!]

“Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds — some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians — may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought with each other.”
~Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised by John Marincola.

Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC) was born at Halicarnassus, which is on the Aegean coast of modern day Turkey. Cicero called him the Father of History because he is the first person we know of who systematically inquired into events of the past and tried to make sure that they had actually happened before creating his own narrative.

That seems obvious to us, but compare his book’s opening lines with the usual way of telling of memorable deeds of the past:

Sing, O Goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. (The Illiad. tr. Butler)

and:

Speak to me, Muse, of the adventurous man who wandered long after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. (The Odyssey, tr. Palmer)

Homer appeals to the goddess for inspiration, and then tells how the gods' actions led to the events following.

But Herodotus begins by saying that he’s going to tell about great things people have done and then gives a lengthy account of the Persians' version of what caused the war: Io was kidnapped by a group of Phoenecian sailors and then in retaliation Europa was kidnapped by a group of Greeks followed by the abduction of Medea which inspired Paris to kidnap Helen. Evidently the Persians thought all this kidnapping was no big deal, but “the Greeks, merely on account of a girl from Sparta, raised a big army, invaded Asia and destroyed the empire of Priam.”

All of this caused the eternal enmity between the Greeks and the Persians. No mention at all of gods, but simply the actions of men — things that can be verified by inquiry. Just for fun, here’s the original Greek text:

Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.
[Source: Sacred Texts]

Oh, and the “word” from Herodotus? The third word in Greek is ἱστορίης, which means inquiry. It is pronounced something like istoria, and gives us our word history.

And there you have the history of History.

~~ ~~ ~*~

This post was originally published 1 October 2013 on my old blog when I was taking an online course in Greek history. My youngest daughter, who is studying the Greek language now, informs me that the little mark above the first i in ἱστορίης is a “rough breathing mark” so there is supposed to be an /h/ sound at the beginning of the word, and the sigma at the end should be pronounced. Historias it is, then!

“I have four parts: letters, literature, the man of letters, and literary style. Letters are what I teach, literature is I who teach, the man of letters is the person whom I have taught, and literary style is the skill of a person whom I form. I claim to speak also about the nature and practice of poetry. Nature is that from which speech is formed. Practice occurs when we put that material into use. To these we add the matter, so as to know what we must talk about. Speech itself is taught in three steps; that is, from letters [i.e. phonemes, the basic units of sound in a particular language], syllables, and words.”
~Grammar, explaining her profession and field of study in The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, by Martianus Capella (fl. A.D. 410-420)

Photo of the Milky Way taken by my son John 10 November 2023

Yesterday I was reading Chaucer’s delightful Parliament of Fouls. Early on, the narrator says he fell asleep reading Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” and he retells the story for the reader. In the dream, Scipio meets his grandfather who “showed him the Galaxy.”

Then today I was reading The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a 5th century Latin work by Martianus Capella. In Book II, Philology is ascending through the heavenly spheres on her way to the wedding. When she reaches the upper limits of the cosmos, the narrator says, “The incandescence of a milk-white river gradually flowed down from the burning stars. Full of joy and thanksgiving she turned toward the Galaxy where she knew that Jove had assembled the divine senate.”

I wondered whether the word “galaxy” was used in the original Latin so I looked it up and sure enough it says, “iter in Galaxeum flectit.” Galaxias is itself a borrowing from Greek.

The story behind the word galaxy is a fun one, so I thought I’d share it.

Prior to modern astronomy, Galaxy simply meant the Milky Way, γάλα [gala] being the Greek word for milk. The story is that after Zeus’s son Heracles was born to the mortal woman Alcmene, Zeus waited till his wife, Hera, was asleep and put the newborn to nurse from her so he could partake of the divine quality of her milk and become divine himself. When Hera woke up and found she was nursing a strange infant, she thrust him away causing milk to spurt from her out into the heavens, and that’s the origin of the Milky Way.

If you study the word “galactic,” you’ll see “lac” in the middle of it. This is because the Latin root lac, milk, seems to have come from an earlier word which has been reconstructed as either *g(a)lag- or *g(a)lakt-. In English, we get from this root lactate, latte, and even lettuce.

Our word milk comes from the Indo-European root melg- which is a verb and means “to rub off,” and also “to milk.” It’s related to the word emulsion which comes from the Latin emulgeo, “to milk out.” In English, the verb milk seems to predate the noun milk. It’s been used from the beginning to refer specifically to human or animal milk. Incidentally, mammals and the mammary glands are named after mamma, which means mother in English, but it means breast in Latin. They both come from the same root, ma-, which means mother, and gives us the Greek Maia (good mother) and also maieutic, which means to act as a midwife, and is the word 17th century philosophers used to describe the Socratic method.

The Old English language also used the word milk to refer to the milky juice you can get from a plant. The 2nd century text Herbarium by Pseudo-Apuleius describes getting milk from wyrte/wort, meaning from a plant (think of the “wort” in St. John’s Wort). “Almond milk” has been used since at least the 1300s, so keep this in mind next time one of your friends scoffs at people talking about almond milk, and insists that milk can only properly refer to that which is produced by the mammary glands. :-D

 

* In linguistics, the asterisk before a word means that the word can’t be found written anywhere, so scholars have made an educated guess about what it probably was.