I am reading a history of the Northern Crusades against the Baltic pagan tribes in the 12th through 15th centuries and I was interested to discover that the Wends, a Slavic tribe that lived in what is now eastern Germany, worshiped a forest god named Radigost.
Now considering J.R.R. Tolkien had more than a passing interest in the Baltic region, especially the Finns and Finnish language and literature, I wonder if Radigost is the source for the wizard Radagast the Brown? After all Tolkien was not above stealing names wholesale from medieval literature. Gandalf and all the dwarves' names from The Hobbit can be found in the Icelandic Prose Edda. And Radigost was a forest god it makes and Radagast was a wizard who lived in Mirkwood, so there is that similarity.
I can't prove any of it, but it makes sense to me.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Monday, September 19, 2016
Admirable "Admiral"
Yes, I have crawled out of my cave to make a blog post. And while it is about a movie, it's not a particularly geeky movie. Unless you are a history geek like me.
Last night on Netflix I watched Admiral, a 2015 Dutch film about Admiral Michiel De Ruyter who consistently beat the British Royal Navy during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars. The film stars Frank Lammers in the title role and has Charles Dance doing an excellent job as a thoroughly debauched King Charles II of England. There is also a cameo by Rutger Hauer at the beginning of the film as Admiral Maarten Tromp. The film is mostly in Dutch but the scenes taking with Charles are in English.
To a large extent this is a standard biopic, but for Anglo-American audiences not overly familiar with Dutch history it provides a good lesson on the intricacies of the Netherlands' internal politics in the mid-17th century. The film manages to get across the sometimes violent political upheavals of the time between the Republicans and the Orangists without getting bogged down in talking. De Ruyter's friend and patron Johan de Witt seeks to strengthen the merchant class and republican form of government while fighting a series or wars with England while William, the Prince of Orange starts off as a rather ineffectual buffoon being used by the aristocrats while learning to be his own man and a ruler in his own right. Both men are not above using De Ruyter for their own political ends and De Ruyter allows himself to be used because he seems himself as a patriot first. This unfortunately leads to his down fall.
De Ruyter, besides being a Dutch patriot, is portrayed as a loving family man who is constantly caught between duty and family. He also seeks to improve his nation's navy and the lot of the regular sailor. Lammers shows a great emotional range in the complex motives of the man.
This is a film of truly epic scope with multiple naval battle scenes that manage to give a really good impression of just how brutal warfare during the age of sail could be while not falling into the trap of graphic ultra-violence. The cinematography on land is incredibly lush and does an excellent job of evoking the 17th century. And I cannot even begin to praise the production design and costume design in it's overall accuracy. All of this was done on a budget of about eight million euros, so there is a lesson in there somewhere for Hollywood.
Overall I truly loved this film but I have two basic complaints. The first is that the events in it cover a period of 25 years from 1653 to 1678. Now of course you can't cover everything that happened to the major characters. But the film gives no idea that such a large amount of time is covered. At the beginning De Ruyter is a middle aged man with several young children and at the end he is still a middle aged man with young children. No one ages. No changes. Unless one is already somewhat familiar with the era you could come away with the idea that everything is happening over the space of only a couple years.
The other complaint, and this is my history geek coming through, is the English ships are always shown flying the Union Jack. Since this flag didn't exist before the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 it is a very jarring anachronism to me. I'm sure the director thought it would make it easier for a modern audience to keep track of which ship is on which side but this could just as have been done by showing English officers speaking on the deck of a ship flying the Cross of St. George, especially since the Dutch ships were all shown flying the present Dutch tricolor.
Last night on Netflix I watched Admiral, a 2015 Dutch film about Admiral Michiel De Ruyter who consistently beat the British Royal Navy during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars. The film stars Frank Lammers in the title role and has Charles Dance doing an excellent job as a thoroughly debauched King Charles II of England. There is also a cameo by Rutger Hauer at the beginning of the film as Admiral Maarten Tromp. The film is mostly in Dutch but the scenes taking with Charles are in English.
To a large extent this is a standard biopic, but for Anglo-American audiences not overly familiar with Dutch history it provides a good lesson on the intricacies of the Netherlands' internal politics in the mid-17th century. The film manages to get across the sometimes violent political upheavals of the time between the Republicans and the Orangists without getting bogged down in talking. De Ruyter's friend and patron Johan de Witt seeks to strengthen the merchant class and republican form of government while fighting a series or wars with England while William, the Prince of Orange starts off as a rather ineffectual buffoon being used by the aristocrats while learning to be his own man and a ruler in his own right. Both men are not above using De Ruyter for their own political ends and De Ruyter allows himself to be used because he seems himself as a patriot first. This unfortunately leads to his down fall.
De Ruyter, besides being a Dutch patriot, is portrayed as a loving family man who is constantly caught between duty and family. He also seeks to improve his nation's navy and the lot of the regular sailor. Lammers shows a great emotional range in the complex motives of the man.
This is a film of truly epic scope with multiple naval battle scenes that manage to give a really good impression of just how brutal warfare during the age of sail could be while not falling into the trap of graphic ultra-violence. The cinematography on land is incredibly lush and does an excellent job of evoking the 17th century. And I cannot even begin to praise the production design and costume design in it's overall accuracy. All of this was done on a budget of about eight million euros, so there is a lesson in there somewhere for Hollywood.
Overall I truly loved this film but I have two basic complaints. The first is that the events in it cover a period of 25 years from 1653 to 1678. Now of course you can't cover everything that happened to the major characters. But the film gives no idea that such a large amount of time is covered. At the beginning De Ruyter is a middle aged man with several young children and at the end he is still a middle aged man with young children. No one ages. No changes. Unless one is already somewhat familiar with the era you could come away with the idea that everything is happening over the space of only a couple years.
The other complaint, and this is my history geek coming through, is the English ships are always shown flying the Union Jack. Since this flag didn't exist before the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 it is a very jarring anachronism to me. I'm sure the director thought it would make it easier for a modern audience to keep track of which ship is on which side but this could just as have been done by showing English officers speaking on the deck of a ship flying the Cross of St. George, especially since the Dutch ships were all shown flying the present Dutch tricolor.
Friday, June 5, 2015
A Sense of Perspective
Yesterday io9.com posted a very interesting video that visualizes and puts into perspective all the of the people who died, both military and civilian, during World War Two.
The video is about eighteen minutes long, but please take the time to watch it.
Now that World War Two is 70 years in the past and most of the survivors are dead there is a tendency when talking about casualties to fall into the A Million Is A Statistic trope. This video succeeds in shaking one out of that mindset by the simple visualizations of the of the graphics.
In particular I commend the creator for really giving the the time to Soviet casualties that they really deserved. There is a tendency here in the West to ignore the apocalyptic scope of the war on the Eastern Front and the millions of Soviet citizens who died largely as the result of Stalin's use of human wave attacks on the offense and keeping civilians in the cities being fought over on the defense. Because most of the casualty records have only become available since the end of the Cold War the sheer level of death and destruction has never really been given the play in the US and western Europe that is should. And it also goes a long way to explain post-war Soviet paranoia.
The section on civilian casualties is particularly chilling. Besides providing a good visualization of all the Nazi victims of the Holocaust including Roma, gays, other religious and political minorities they also pointed out that Poland suffered the highest percentage of deaths of any country because of the systemic Nazi abuse of the population. Add in both German and Russian complete indifference to civilians on the Eastern Front as mentioned above. And the Western Allies don't get a free pass on the civilian deaths front either with a very clear showing of the effect of targeting German and Japanese cities for aerial bombardment.
But in the midst of all these depressing numbers, at the end once actually gets a bit of a surprising sense of perspective of the world today. Looking at the headlines one gets a feeling that that the world is going to hell in a handbasket with wars, death and destruction seemingly everywhere. But when you visually compare the relatively low intensity fighting going on in the Middle East and elsewhere to the shear level of carnage of the six years of WW2 you can think "If my grandparents could live through that and stay sane, I can certainly not give in to the fearmongering created by the 24/7 news cycle of today."
Finally, I did like the bit where they scaled WW2 deaths and all other major conflicts in history to world population at the time and when it comes to causing death and destruction, Genghis Khan makes both Hitler and Stalin look like pikers.
The video is about eighteen minutes long, but please take the time to watch it.
Now that World War Two is 70 years in the past and most of the survivors are dead there is a tendency when talking about casualties to fall into the A Million Is A Statistic trope. This video succeeds in shaking one out of that mindset by the simple visualizations of the of the graphics.
In particular I commend the creator for really giving the the time to Soviet casualties that they really deserved. There is a tendency here in the West to ignore the apocalyptic scope of the war on the Eastern Front and the millions of Soviet citizens who died largely as the result of Stalin's use of human wave attacks on the offense and keeping civilians in the cities being fought over on the defense. Because most of the casualty records have only become available since the end of the Cold War the sheer level of death and destruction has never really been given the play in the US and western Europe that is should. And it also goes a long way to explain post-war Soviet paranoia.
The section on civilian casualties is particularly chilling. Besides providing a good visualization of all the Nazi victims of the Holocaust including Roma, gays, other religious and political minorities they also pointed out that Poland suffered the highest percentage of deaths of any country because of the systemic Nazi abuse of the population. Add in both German and Russian complete indifference to civilians on the Eastern Front as mentioned above. And the Western Allies don't get a free pass on the civilian deaths front either with a very clear showing of the effect of targeting German and Japanese cities for aerial bombardment.
But in the midst of all these depressing numbers, at the end once actually gets a bit of a surprising sense of perspective of the world today. Looking at the headlines one gets a feeling that that the world is going to hell in a handbasket with wars, death and destruction seemingly everywhere. But when you visually compare the relatively low intensity fighting going on in the Middle East and elsewhere to the shear level of carnage of the six years of WW2 you can think "If my grandparents could live through that and stay sane, I can certainly not give in to the fearmongering created by the 24/7 news cycle of today."
Finally, I did like the bit where they scaled WW2 deaths and all other major conflicts in history to world population at the time and when it comes to causing death and destruction, Genghis Khan makes both Hitler and Stalin look like pikers.
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Cinco de Mayo
Today is Cinco de Mayo, which while an important holiday in Mexico is not nearly as big a deal as it is here north of the border where it's a good excuse to get drunk on tequila.
Most of the folks getting drunk think they are celebrating Mexican independence day but that was actually September 16, 1810. What Cinco de Mayo actually celebrates is the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.
Without getting bogged down in the details, while the United States was busy with its Civil War, Napoleon III of France thought it would be a good idea to turn Mexico into a French client state and so invaded it. The Battle of Puebla was the first victory of the Mexicans over the French.
So really you have to ask yourself, what's the big deal. The Mexicans beat the French. Everyone beats the French. If we had a party at every French defeat we'd all be perpetually either drunk or hungover.
Snark aside, the Puebla is in fact something for Mexicans to be proud of. It's not every day that 4,500 militia men can defeat a larger (6,500 man) army of crack regulars. My point is though, if you are going to use a foreign holiday as an excuse to party at least know why you are partying.
Most of the folks getting drunk think they are celebrating Mexican independence day but that was actually September 16, 1810. What Cinco de Mayo actually celebrates is the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.
Without getting bogged down in the details, while the United States was busy with its Civil War, Napoleon III of France thought it would be a good idea to turn Mexico into a French client state and so invaded it. The Battle of Puebla was the first victory of the Mexicans over the French.
So really you have to ask yourself, what's the big deal. The Mexicans beat the French. Everyone beats the French. If we had a party at every French defeat we'd all be perpetually either drunk or hungover.
Snark aside, the Puebla is in fact something for Mexicans to be proud of. It's not every day that 4,500 militia men can defeat a larger (6,500 man) army of crack regulars. My point is though, if you are going to use a foreign holiday as an excuse to party at least know why you are partying.
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