"Not only during peacetime but also in war, the Gauls obey with great care these Druids and singing poets, both friend and enemy alike. Often when the two armies have come together with swords drawn these men have stepped between the battle-lines and stopped the conflict, as if they held wild animals spell-bound. Thus even among the most brutal barbarians angry passion yields to wisdom and Ares stands in awe of the Muses."
~ Diodorus Siculus (fl. c. 60-c. 30 BC)
Bibliotheca Historica, Book V.31
 |
| Some Lewis-inspired reading |
Last week a group of my internet friends and I were talking about books that had a formative influence on us so I thought I’d rework it into a blog post. These books are a few of the earliest influences that are still with me, in roughly chronological order of reading.
1. The big, gorgeously illustrated book of fairy tales from around the world, which was part of my steady reading diet for most of the first decade of my life. There are a couple I first met in that book that I still enjoy reading – they’re both in Andrew Lang’s books. “The Bones of Djulung” is a Polynesian tale that’s in the Lilac Fairy Book, and “The Song of the Yara” is a Brazilian tale found in the Brown Fairy Book (Lang calls it “The Story of the Yara,” but I’m pretty sure my book called it a song). I’ve long since lost this book, but boy I wish I could find another copy of it! It was big and orange and had a paisley pattern on it, and it’s probably why orange was my favorite color as a child and I still love paisley.
2. An illustrated edition of King Arthur stories. I didn’t read it as much as the fairy tale book, but it was one of my early favorites and led me to read lots more of the same kind of thing. This book and the big fairy tale book were on the bookshelf in my room in my earliest memories. I have a feeling that these two books and the others were put there at the same time as the crib, changing table, and rocking chair. The fairy tales and King Arthur stories really shaped my taste in story, and to this day the stories I love best are the Romances, the stories that have a fairy tale shape.
3. Mere Christianity, which I first read when I was 15 or 16 years old. I grew up Baptist, and that meant that I was very familiar with the Bible, but I’d never had anything remotely resembling a systematic theology taught to me. Not that MC is exactly that, but it was the first clear, logical explanation of key elements of the Faith that I’d ever come across and it was like drinking water from a clear mountain spring. After reading that I searched out more of Lewis’s non-fiction and I feel like he’s been my spiritual father ever since then. I like to call him Saint Jack. :-D
4. Surprised by Joy, which I first read about a year after Mere Christianity. This is when I discovered that Lewis was a kindred spirit, and I’ve spent most of the rest of my intellectual life alternating between wanting to read everything he wrote and wanting to read everything he read. The former might be possible, but the latter never will. My interest in the last few years has been reading things he talks about in The Discarded Image, which is why I’m now reading Martianus Capella, as I mentioned in my last post. It was Lewis’s love of The Faerie Queene that first led me to read it, and you can see how the foundation for my own love of it was laid in my childhood. I’ve written so much about FQ here that it has its own tag.
5. Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language, by Robert Claiborne. My mom bought this for me when I was 17 or 18 because I was already a word-nerd but I had no idea that there could be a biography of a language. It expanded my word-nerdery into love of languages and how they work. Even though I haven’t had many opportunities to study that kind of thing it’s always on my radar, even to this day (hence this post last week on the life of the word galaxy). Mike has memories from early in our acquaintance (I was 19 when we met) of me talking about this book a lot and he says that one time brought it with me to some singles group activity. I don’t remember any of that specifically, but I’ve been taking books to social evens since I was a child. Being a grown up I try not to do that anymore. :-D
 |
| Photo of the Milky Way taken by my son John 10 November 2023 |
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.
