Working The Trapline — Buchan, Balkans & The Rapids Of The Dead

This Indian Summer thing may have done got out of hand. We’re experiencing highs in the mid-to-high 80s, and we’ll be in the 80s for the next two weeks. With all that, I have much to do at the homestead and at The Nugget Newspaper offices — grass to cut, pine needles to rake, etc.

Which allowed me to listen to John Buchan’s folk horror yarn No-Man’s Land. As anticipated, it is a good un. A real good un. Remnant Picts and so forth…

The narrator of the tale is a scholar/sportsman of that particular Victorian/Edwardian stripe that adventured in the hinterlands of Empire. Our fellow is clearly smitten with The Northern Thing:

…the ancient life of the North, of the Celts and the Northmen and the unknown Pictish tribes, held for me the chief fascination. I had acquired a smattering of Gaelic, having been brought up as a boy in Lochaber, and now I set myself to increase my store of languages. I mastered Erse and Icelandic, and my first book — a monograph on the probable Celtic elements in the Eddic songs — brought me the praise of scholars and the deputy-professor’s chair of Northern Antiquities. So much for Oxford. My vacations had been spent mainly in the North — in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isles, in Scandinavia and Iceland, once even in the far limits of Finland. I was a keen sportsman of a sort, an old-experienced fisher, a fair shot with gun and rifle, and in my hillcraft I might well stand comparison with most men.

Our kinda feller.

It is easy to assume that Buchan’s story influenced Robert E. Howard, who shared a fascination with the Picts. A conversation with Deuce Richardson pointed me to the Robert E. Howard Bookshelf:

….comprised of books, magazines, stories, articles, poetry, manuscripts and dramatizations that Robert E. Howard either may have possessed as part of his library, or that he mentions in his correspondence or stories. The list also includes writers he mentions, whether or not he names a work by them. 

No Buchan.

We do know that Tolkien read Buchan, which stands to reason. Buchan’s work was very popular when Tolkien was a young man, and they share the passion for the North — though Buchan (a Scotsman, after all) is more enamored of things Celtic than the Saxon-smitten Professor. There is a persistent myth that Tolkien never read anything “modern,” but that’s been throughly debunked.

Speaking of Tolkien, I just found out that his Webley revolver from World War I service is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, North, in Manchester. Ain’t that something?

From IWM:

In June 1916 Tolkien went to France and was posted to the 11th Battalion, The Lancashire Fusiliers. From July onwards his battalion went in and out of the line along the northern sector of the Somme. He occupied front line trenches in Beaumont-Hamel, Serre and the Leipzig Salient. On 28 September they undertook a successful raid against the Pope’s Nose opposite Thiepval and on 21 October helped to capture Regina Trench. In both of these actions, Tolkien served as Battalion Signalling Officer.

At the end of October, worn down by weeks of tension and wretched conditions, Tolkien contracted trench fever and was sent back to hospital in Birmingham. He remained unfit for the rest of the war.

The impact of the battle remained with him for the rest of his life and many people have seen its influence in his writing.

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And speaking of World War I… The Great War just released a piece on the Balkan Wars that were a prelude to the great conflagration. The Balkans have historically been a frontier borderland zone — and a bloody one.

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Some more folk horror with distinct Creepy Olde England vibes from this award-winning short film. Warning: ’Tis a terrible tale, so it is. Not a happy one at all.

 

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From folk horror to historical horror: Trailing along with Iroquois trappers of the NWC and HBC led me to the Rapids of the Dead. I had never heard these tales of tragedy, murder and cannibalism on the Columbia River. It is well to remember how terrifying life on the frontier could be.

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We have  trailer for The Last Manhunt, Jason Momoa’s passion project recounting the tragic tale of Willie Boy.

It looks very strong.

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It’s October 10 — call it Columbus Day, call it Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Doesn’t matter. Just mark it. I choose not to get drawn into moronic culture wars debates over this kind of symbolic observance. It is entirely possible — indeed, appropriate — to recognize the world-historical impact of Columbus’s remarkable voyage and to recognize that he did not discover a “new” world (much less India). It would be best if the culture warriors would just shut up and learn something, both about the world that made Christopher Columbus — a world that would be altered profoundly by the late-medieval/Renaissance “discovery” of the Americas — and the world that the intrusion of Europeans would also alter profoundly, indeed, catastrophically.