Interesting things I read or thought about in January 2026
Dragons, romance novels, Ezra Pound, Tang-era poetry, journalistic dishonesty, Beowulf, intelligence and liberalism, the most Irish policy ever, the lessons from Quakers about religion and culture
In case you missed it, I spent a lot of time this month reading and thinking about Mormonism, but separated out my thoughts into their own post so as not to monopolise this one (thus resulting in this post being late):
Otherwise, I ended up writing a smaller number of ‘meatier’ sections this month. Again, this format is still an experiment, I’d be grateful for feedback about how you find these posts, and whether you prefer more topics with less detail.
What the fuck are dragons?
Last month’s post included the following line:
For a long time we mistakenly thought the dinosaurs were all lizard-y things, and mistakenly thought they had all died. Palaeontologists now know better, have begun to stop projecting human stories about dragons and sea serpents onto dinosaur fossils, and have seen them for closer to what they really were—really are.
I didn’t think too much about the claim I was making about dragons as I was writing this line. But reading it back now, it’s clear that I was arguing something like the following: human stories about dragons and sea serpents had a causal influence on how we interpret dinosaur fossils. With hindsight, I realise that this is the complete opposite of the conventional wisdom.
Dragons are a widespread fantasy monster, and famously exist in the mythology of both Europe and China. Chinese and European dragons are very different in a lot of ways, but they are obviously the same kind of thing. It’s very implausible that Europe got the idea from China, and it’s ludicrous to suggest that China got the idea from Europe, but it seems very likely to not just be a coincidence; therefore there must be a common cause.
And the conventional wisdom is: the common cause is fossils. There are fossils, especially dinosaur fossils, in both Europe and China, people would have come across them, and inevitably they would have noticed that (a) this is an animal bone but (b) it is not the bone of any kind of animal they’d ever seen before. They’d try to interpret the fossils they were looking at; and, the theory claims, the interpretation that was most natural for pre-scientific humans looked roughly the same across all cultures: big, scaly, lizard- or snake-like thing, possibly with wings.
I was reminded of the fact that this is the conventional wisdom by reading Michael Taylor’s book Impossible Monsters (not recommended; my review here). It’s also stated as fact on the Rest is History episode about the history of dinosaur fossil-hunting. My beloved Ronald Hutton, author of what is probably my favourite ever work of cultural history, advocates for an interesting and nuanced version of this theory, that attempts to also explain why other places with lots of fossils (like North America) weren’t so dragon-obsessed, and why European dragons took the particular fire-breathing form that they did.1 But at root, he too thinks that the idea of dragons came from people looking at fossils. Hutton cites Adrienne Mayor’s book The First Fossil Hunters, which goes much broader than dragons, and tries to establish reliable connections between all sorts of mythical beasts—griffins, centaurs, cyclopes, etc.—and specific fossil sites.
Mayor’s book is the most plausible and detailed version of this theory.2 But I think it actually shoots the theory in the foot, at least insofar as it comes to dragons. (Mayor herself doesn’t seem to care so much about dragons specifically, so I think she probably wouldn’t think of this as a criticism.) One thing you realise from Mayor’s book is the diversity and weirdness of fossils: if she’s even close to right about some of the stories she tells, then a whole range of bizarre and weird and wonderful imaginary creatures are rooted in fossils. But we’re not trying to explain why there’s a wide range of creatures, we’re trying to explain the opposite: why such different cultures have converged on ideas in such a narrow range as the dragon.
After all, even if you think that dinosaurs naturally ‘seem’ very dragon-y, it’s worth noting that not all fossils are dinosaur fossils. Maybe the land vertebrates whose fossils have the highest product of ‘found in easily-accessible locations’ and ‘abundant’ are horses. (As a result of this fact, the evolutionary history of the horse is absurdly well-reconstructed—relevant In Our Time.) It’s very hard to imagine somebody looking at horse fossils with no preconceptions and going, ‘yup, that’s a dragon all right’: they knew what horses were!
Even more abundant than horses are invertebrates, like trilobites and ammonites, which are even further from dragons. The conventional wisdom relies on you thinking that, if a group of people kept coming across dinosaur fossils, they’d eventually piece together a picture in their minds that looks a bit like a dragon. But ancient communities’ experience with fossils would have been much weirder and less consistent than that. Without modern scientific tools they’d not have been able to sort this type of fossil from that type of fossil with high reliability. Intuitively this seems like it would give rise to a bunch of myths about weird hybrid creatures; certainly it seems likely to produce a diverse set of mythical creatures depending on which exact fossils each culture found, and how they interpreted them. But with dragons, we instead see relative narrowness and consistency.
Even if we just focus on dinosaur fossils (plus other large prehistoric reptiles like dinosauromorphs, pseudosuchians, ichthyosaurs, etc.), it’s not at all clear that people who found them before the modern era would have had a consistent way of interpreting them. Even in the twentieth century, dino fossils were assigned to non-dino species (and vice versa) all the time, and no doubt it’s still happening today despite the best efforts of palaeontologists: it’s just hard to figure this stuff out, and there’s lots of degrees of freedom in interpreting fossils. And that’s with the theoretical framework and serious training that modern palaeontologists have. When it comes to how things were before modern biology, I will just give one example: famously, there is a partial Megalosaurus femur that was discovered in the seventeenth century and given the name Scrotum humanum, because, uh, that’s exactly what they thought it was.
So even if people were coming across lots of dino fossils, and didn’t mix them up with any other kinds of fossils, they may not have even realised that they were looking at a large land reptile.3 Today if you see a complete, reconstructed dinosaur skeleton in a museum, alongside an artist’s rendering of it as a scaly monster, then you might well tilt your head and go, ‘yeah, that looks a bit like a dragon’. But I think my initial hunch was right: this is because you, or (rather) the artist and the wider culture, have pre-existing ideas about dragons that get projected onto dinosaurs. It’s not because it’s natural to look at unreconstructed dino bones and go ‘dragon’.
The final point is that dinos are old: all non-avian dinosaur fossils are at least 66 million years old. As a result, they tend to be embedded deeper into rock than mammalian fossils; the rock itself will be older, which (as a rule of thumb) generally means that it’s harder and more solid; and they’re harder to extract without breaking. Modern palaeontologists have to be well-trained for this, and even nineteenth-century fossil hunters generally had quite specialised skills: the whole modern interest in dinosaurs was kicked off by people like Mary Anning, who had become skilled in extracting fossils in order to sell them to tourists and rich collectors in newly-industrialising Britain. Would random peasant farmers with no such skills or incentives really have been able to get dino fossils out of the rock, in an intact enough state in order to conclude anything more than ‘oh, weird, that rock looks a bit like a leg’? (Or even: ‘that rock looks a bit like a ballsack?’)
This post by Mark Witton makes the same point, that pre-modern people would have struggled to extract dinosaur fossils, and backs it up with a really interesting example: lots of the items that get sold in China as ‘dragon bones’ are indeed fossils, but mostly mammal fossils. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of ‘dragon teeth’ come from ancient horses, exactly what you’d expect from horse fossils being so common. I think Witton takes the wrong lesson from this, though. He concludes that actually, we should associate Chinese dragons with mammal fossils; but Chinese people are not stupid, they know what horses look like, if they came across horse fossils in their initial context they’d not leap to ‘dragon’. Of course, they don’t usually see them in their original context: the teeth are taken away from the rest of the fossil and sold for purportedly medicinal purposes. My conclusion is rather that snake-oil salesmen will sell anything they can get their hands on to a population that is already primed to believe in dragons, for reasons that have little-to-nothing to do with fossils.
But this brings us back to our initial point: we’ve thrown out the theory, but we still need some alternative explanation of why similar-looking mythical dragons are so common across cultures where cultural exchange is unlikely. It is weird that dragon myths exist in Europe and in China!
As far as I can tell, the theory that comes second place in conventional wisdom is that dragons come from snakes. Humans have some kind of universal deeply-ingrained fear of snakes, which is plausibly an evolutionary adaptation (snakes can kill you!); so we have a natural tendency to tell stories about big scary snakes, and draw pictures of big scary snakes; over time the snakes get bigger and bigger, and we begin adding other crazy features (they can fly! they have crazy claws! they breathe fire! they’re magic!) to make the pictures cooler / to make the stories more exciting. And after a few million years of cultural evolution, the end result of this process is dragons. Carl Sagan once suggested that this might be the case.
This theory has some a priori plausibility. It struggles with the fact that Chinese dragons, and many other cultures’ dragons, are not actually supposed to be scary; but maybe you can explain that away. But (more seriously) it’s very handwavy? Evopsych is handwavy and non-rigourous enough on its own, but when we get into the territory of evo–cultural anthropology, things really get vague. If a culture has a story about a scary reptile thing that does look like European or Chinese dragons, the theory says that’s to be expected; but if a culture has a story about a scary reptile that doesn’t look very much like European or Chinese dragons, well, that just means they took the fundamental idea in a different direction! It seems like the theory’s falsifiable content might just reduce to ‘the vast majority of human cultures will tell stories about scary creatures that are a bit like snakes’, which, like, duh. This theory would only have real meat if it could tell us how stories about scary reptiles change over time, and what factors explain why they evolved in very similar ways in Europe and China. But we don’t understand cultural evolution well enough to build a proper model of this.4
But the fact remains: it is striking how similar European and Chinese dragons are. Why? I don’t know! Maybe we’ll never know! It’s worth being fascinated by this even if we don’t have the answer.
Unfamiliar genres
Uri Bram recommends Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare:
I mainly recommend this if you’re 1) a nerdy, literary person, who 2) has never read a modern romance novel. I’m not sure you’ll enjoy it; presumably there’s a reason you’ve never read a romance novel, and perhaps that reason is that you know they’re not for you. But I think this one manages to be a ‘true’ representative of the genre (not a deconstructed upmarket reimagining) while also being an intelligent, well-constructed novel with good psychological depth.
I endorse Uri’s thesis about the book, without being able to endorse his recommendation. It turns out that modern romance novels really aren’t for me! I breezed through The Flatshare in a couple of days, and have barely thought about it since.
But it does raise the broader question of how you’re supposed to get people into unfamiliar genres. There’s a really common and frustrating experience that I know a lot of people have: you read an incredible author who opens your eyes to a whole new approach to writing, you ask ‘is there any more of this?’, and the answer is ‘… uh no sorry that’s your lot’.
Sometimes this is just because the author really is completely unique. If you like Borges, sorry to say, but there’s only one Borges. But a lot of the time the author is writing within a recognisable genre, but in a ‘deconstructed’ (as Uri puts it) or literary manner, taking well-worn tropes and hitching them to the author’s own unique ideas. The issue is that readers get exposed to the tropes in the context of them being played around with in interesting ways; so even if they’d have liked a book where the tropes are played ‘straight’ if that’s what they started with, now that book will seem lesser.
So if someone tells me they really like Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, and asks what else they should read (apart from ‘more Pynchon’), I struggle. I could tell them to read Shea and Anton-Wilson’s Illuminatus!, which is equally conspiratorial, paranoid, drug-fuelled, and all the rest of it. But it’s a ‘true’ representative of conspiracy fiction, whereas Lot 49 is an ‘elevated’ example of the genre, and so people won’t be getting exactly the thing they thought they signed up for. Going from Illuminatus! to Lot 49 could be a pleasant surprise; going from Lot 49 to Illuminatus! might well just be a let-down.
This isn’t just a matter of Lot 49 being better than Illuminatus! (although it obviously is). To give a different example, I think mostly everyone agrees that John le Carré was the best Cold War spy novelist. But if you really love John le Carré and pick up one of Graham Greene’s spy novels, it won’t be as good, but it will be recognisably the same kind of thing as the novels you love; the difference will merely be quantitative, whereas I’m talking about more of a qualitative difference. It’s more like: if you’ve been introduced to the tropes by seeing them subverted, it’s hard to then just sit through someone playing them ‘straight’; even if you would have liked the tropes on their own, the way you were introduced to them means you’re now going to be itching for subversion.
Accordingly, I think there should be a service akin to Five Books, but rather than being the best examples of some category, it should be the best representative examples. The best Golden Age detective novel (in my view) is Christie’s Five Little Pigs, but it shouldn’t go on the list; the list should instead have Death on the Nile or And Then There Were None as its Christie pick.
So Uri’s given his ‘good but also representative’ recommendation for the modern romance genre; I’ve suggested ‘good but also representative’ examples of a few others; I’d love to hear further recommendations in the comments.
Ezra Pound and Tang-era poetry
Over at The Fitzwilliam, my fellow editor Sam Enright published a great travelogue about Taiwan back in December. In an aside he lamented the quality of translation of Tang-era Chinese poetry into English; I duly started looking into Tang-era poetry in English. I tend to agree with him, that much of what you find gives you the vague sense that there’s something great standing behind it, but not what the great thing actually is. My brain is telling me to quote Matthew Arnold on the Mabinogion: the translator of Tang-era poetry is ‘like a peasant building his hut in the site of Halicarnassus of Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition only’. This is probably unfair—the translators know, they just cannot represent what they know in English—but it gets at something about the experience of reading the translations.
One weird exception hit me in the In Our Time on Tang-era poetry. Melvyn asks his three guests—all of whom are fluent Chinese speakers and experts on Chinese culture, up-to-date on the current state of the field, and one of whom actually is Chinese—about which translations they would recommend. A few names came up, but (strikingly) they gush about Ezra Pound’s translations of Li Bai in Cathay! Tian Yuan Tan singles out Pound’s translation of one particular couplet of Li Bai’s, that comes right at the end of Cathay:
Drawing sword, cut into water, water again flow:
Raise cup, quench sorrow, sorrow again sorry.
‘Sorrow again sorry’ is obviously not normative English, but apparently (note: I can’t read Chinese at all, so this is based purely on second-hand information) it is a rendering of Li Bai’s original that if anything is ‘over-literal’. But in this case, it’s Ezra fucking Pound, and he’s able to measure the limits of English so precisely that he gets away with it: it really is a fantastic little couplet.
I was familiar with Cathay, but I’d always basically taken it as a work of Pound’s, and not put too much stock in its accuracy as translation, given that (y’know) Pound didn’t know Chinese (!). But after listening to the In Our Time I dug into this, and found Taiwanese poet Wai-lim Yip’s book Ezra Pound’s Cathay. I don’t really feel like I can say that I ‘read’ it, because I skipped around a lot and couldn’t follow some of the discussions of the Chinese language, but it is one of those books that strikes you as a small masterpiece. It’s equally painstaking on Li Bai’s originals and on Pound’s process, really traces Pound’s ideas in the years leading up to Cathay and the non-Chinese influences on the text, and even does a ‘retranslation’ in an appendix. (In one of the best dedications I’ve ever seen, the book is ‘for Ezra Pound, if he wants it’.)
One day I will sit down with Yip’s book and Cathay (maybe the recent critical edition) and read through both slowly; but for the time being I will just report Yip’s conclusions. Pound messed up a bunch, partly through the Chinese-whispers process by which the poems reached him, and partly just by messing up. But also, there were numerous places where Pound was working from an English-language source that had badly garbled the Chinese original, and yet—in the process of trying to ‘poeticise’ his source—Pound somehow reintroduced elements that were in the original, which he couldn’t possibly have known about. It happens too often to be pure chance: it’s a bit spooky, Yip even calls it ‘a kind of clairvoyance’.
It reminded me of my thoughts about Stephen MacKenna’s translation of Plotinus’ Enneads. Plotinus was one of the great philosophical geniuses, but he wasn’t a great writer, he’s over-dense and often writes in a free-associative way that feels improvised and unrevised. MacKenna was a great writer, and he translated Plotinus into an English style that is utterly amazing—and for that reason, completely unlike Plotinus’ Greek style. And yet, somehow, the style fits: it feels like Plotinus, like the style and the philosophy are locked together (in the way described by Bernard Williams), even though it’s not actually Plotinus at all. I said that what we have here is ‘a translator who genuinely understood the mind of his subject, in all its depths.’ I take it that, perhaps, something similar is going on with Pound: as a poet of comparable talent to Li Bai, got something deep about what Li Bai was trying to do, a kind of poetic ‘knowledge-how’ that isn’t reducible to sinological ‘knowledge-that’ and which allowed him to make judgment-calls about Li Bai’s intentions.5
It is unfair how good some people are at everything. Not content with being (probably) the most important poet of his own century, Pound also found time to be a pretty damn good translator of poetry from a millennium earlier, in a language he didn’t speak.
I suppose I could take solace in the fact that Pound was obviously terrible at social, economic, and political analysis, with all his Major Douglas–meets-Hitler kind of stuff. But even then, I always find that when the politics intrudes into his poems, it’s kind of unintentionally funny, and doesn’t fuck things up too much? Canto XLIX is the one that always sticks in my mind: the transition is so sudden that it puts me in the mind of a crazy old man suddenly interrupting himself mid-story to yell about immigrants, and I can only laugh—which means that I don’t take it seriously, and it doesn’t affect how much I adore what comes before.
… Comes then snow scur on the river
And a world is covered with jade
Small boat floats like a lanthorn,
The flowing water clots as with cold. And at San Yin
they are a people of leisure.
Wild geese swoop to the sand-bar,
Clouds gather about the hole of the window
Broad water; geese line out with the autumn
Rooks clatter over the fishermen’s lanthorns,
A light moves on the north sky line;
where the young boys prod stones for shrimp.
In seventeen hundred came Tsing to these hill lakes.
A light moves on the south sky line.State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt?
This is infamy; this is Geryon…
Maybe I shouldn’t laugh: he was an actual honest-to-goodness fascist. But I do.
One final line about Tang-era poetry, also taken from the In Our Time episode (it is such a remarkable show).
Frances Wood: It’s quite funny to talk about [the Du Fu poem ‘Five Hundred Words About My Journey’], because the first time I encountered this poem in any sort of detail was at Peking University during the Cultural Revolution, when we had some lessons in Chinese poetics from a very sweet teacher there.
But we discovered that one of the problems during the Cultural Revolution … was that it was very difficult to find bits of literature of the past that illustrated ‘good proletarian ideals’. And out of the five hundred lines [sic] of Du Fu’s poems, we were allowed to study precisely two!6
… We [also] studied The Dream of the Red Chamber, a massive eighteenth-century novel which is of great significance in China still. But … only one chapter, out of about eighty.
The most dishonest piece of writing I have read
OK, that’s a bit of a hyperbolic subheading. But I do kind of recommend this as a fun reading comprehension exercise—I think we could productively set this for children to work on in school! It was in the Guardian: ‘I was warned my children would be ripped in half when we divorced. But I had no idea just how brutal custody cases can be’. I believe it’s an extract from a book, Custody by Laura Feigel.
Feigel is trying to argue that the current court approach to custody, and particularly the idea of ‘parental alienation’. I am deeply sympathetic to this argument. I do think that ‘parental alienation’ is mostly bullshit, and family courts are often very stupid and extremely liable to be misled by ‘experts’ who have little actual expertise. I want to say this explicitly; I wanted to like Feigel’s argument. But then I began to notice a few … inconsistencies.
For example, here’s an extract from Feigel’s description of one particular case where a judge ruled against a mother and gave custody to the father:
The mother gives vague excuses for not attending nursery stay and plays. But … she may worry that the father will attend. Shouldn’t we accept that she feels intimidated by this man [the father] she remains financially dependent on—a man she alleges saw strangulation as part of good sex?
My initial instinct on reading this was that yes, indeed, this is the kind of sexual practice that’s liable to cause fear and feelings of intimidation, even when it’s supposedly consensual. I totally felt like I could imagine the mother looking back on times she mouthed consent to strangulation, and realising with hindsight that she felt too scared to say ‘no’. As you read this, you may feel a little bit shocked and confused that the court didn’t accept this reasoning: that’s certainly what Feigel wants you to feel.
But then you read between the lines. You notice a confusing mention of the father’s ‘disregard for his own physical safety’, or a weird point about dominance, and maybe it clicks for you like it did for me: the father wasn’t the one doing the strangulation—he was the one being strangled! All of Feigel’s descriptions of his sexual practices are coded, written in just such a way as to make it entirely natural to assume that he was violent in bed, while not ever explicitly saying this because it would be libelous.
In her description of another case, Feigel introduces accusations that the father was abusive, and lets them linger for over a dozen paragraphs before a sentence that you have to read twice to realise: ‘oh, this is her accepting that the allegations were untrue.’
Honestly it’s a fun challenge, actually quite a difficult reading comprehension exercise. You may find more ‘breadcrumbs’ that I missed. The article actually made me sympathetic to ‘parental alienation’, which I didn’t think would be possible!
‘What’: the first word of Beowulf
Hat-tip to Graham Scheper on YouTube for pointing me towards George Walkden’s 2013 article on ‘The status of hwæt in Old English’, from a little over ten years ago. This is super important and cool, and Walkden tried to publicise it; but he was very bad at explaining the significance of his own findings, as can be seen from the Reddit comments completely missing the point. Scheper is a little better but is a bit ‘YouTube sensationalist’ (if you know what I mean). So let me give it a go myself.
The first few lines of Beowulf, the famed Old English poem, are:
Hwæt we Gardena in geardagum
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon
If I do a really crude and bad word-for-word dictionary substitution without changing the word order, it’s something like this:
Hwæt we, of the Spear-Danes in days gone by,
of their nation-kings, glory have heard;
how those princes strength performed.
OK, so this is obviously awkward in modern English because I haven’t changed the word order. But it seems like everything from ‘we’ forward is a pretty complete sentence. We have heard about the glory of the Spear-Danes in days gone by and their kings, and (in particular) we heard that those princes performed strength. So what is that first word ‘hwæt’ doing there?
The standard story that I had always heard is that it’s an interjection: a word that’s grammatically independent of everything else, and is only there to add emphasis or attract attention. In Ulster English, we use the word ‘so’ like this, to start a story or a question or whatever; and thus Seamus Heaney, translating the poem into Ulster English, renders these lines as:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
In other varieties of English like General American, there aren’t very many common interjections with the same neutral sense, that just add emphasis.7 The closest might be ‘fuck’ or ‘bro’ or something like that, though obviously these carry their own very particular connotations. Maria Dahvana Headley actually uses one of these in her extremely strange Beowulf translation, which starts ‘Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!’; but most translators have gone for more-neutral but also more-clunky options like ‘Well.’ or ‘Listen!’, which don’t reflect how anyone really speaks but at least avoid the weirdness of ‘bro’. They make these clunky choices because they want to find an interjection that can translate ‘hwæt’.
Here’s the thing, though: ‘hwæt’ is literally just the modern English word ‘what’. It was used in Old English to start questions, just like modern ‘what’. (Indeed, if you come to Scotland, you will still occasionally hear people saying ‘what’ with that initial ‘h’ sound.) And in modern English, ‘what’ isn’t an interjection.8 (Imagine reading:
What. The Spear-Danes in days gone by…)
But, hey, Old English is very unlike modern English, words change meaning, grammar changes drastically. So everyone just assumed that this was a weird usage, a special way of using ‘what’ that died out.
Walkden is here to say that this is completely wrong. He points out that in modern English you can use ‘what’ in another way than just to ask questions. You know this: ‘what big teeth you have!’, or (the top comment on Scheper’s video as I write this) ‘what a good video this was!’ This is perfectly grammatical in modern English, whereas using ‘what’ as an interjection is ungrammatical.
You’ll notice that, when you use ‘what’ in this way, it rearranges the sentence: the verb moves closer to the end, so that ‘you have big teeth’ turns into ‘what big teeth you have’. Whereas interjections don’t change the order of the sentence at all (because they have no grammatical effects): if you want to tell your bro he has big teeth, you say ‘bro, you have big teeth!’; saying ‘bro, big teeth you have!’ makes you sound like Yoda.
You will also notice that, in the first few lines of Beowulf, the verb—‘gefrunon’, ‘we have heard’—is pushed nearly all the way to the end of the first sentence. In modern English, this would be slam-dunk proof that ‘hwæt’ is not an interjection.9 In Old English, it’s not quite that simple, because word order was a bit more flexible, and writers had a bit of choice about what words they want to put first and what they want to put last; maybe the poet just liked the way it sounded? Well, no: most of Walkden’s paper is taken up by an analysis of Old English sentences that start with ‘hwæt’; the verb is near the end of the sentence in a higher proportion than could be explained by chance or personal preference alone. The conclusion is that the verb-at-the-end thing is a grammatical rule—the same grammatical rule that still applies in modern English when you start a sentence with the same word.
That is to say, ‘hwæt’ isn’t being used in Beowulf in an unusual way, a special Old English way that doesn’t exist any more. It’s being used in a way that ‘what’ can still be used in modern English; not as an interjection, but as a particular kind of underspecified pronoun. The start of Beowulf is something like ‘what great deeds we have heard about!’
Yet for centuries, intelligent and fluent-English-speaking scholars (all of whom have presumably said ‘what big teeth you have!’ at some point in their lives) have looked at this sentence, and not one of them remembered the fact that ‘what’ could be used in this way in modern English, up until Walkden in 2013. They instead felt the need to invent a supposed special Old English meaning of the word to make sense of what they were seeing.
This is weird, right? One of the definitions of fluency is that you’re supposed to have an intuitive sense of what is grammatical in your language.
This is correct. But our intuitive judgments of grammaticality are extremely contextual and local. If we have a sentence in clear and plain and unambiguous modern English (like ‘what big teeth you have!’) right there in front of us, we can tell you ‘ah yes, that is a valid way to use the word “what”.’ But if the sentence in front of us isn’t completely clear and plain; or if, as in Beowulf, it’s not in modern English; or if there’s not even a specific sentence we’re discussing, we’re just talking about meaning in the abstract—then our knowledge of our own language breaks down dramatically, we forget things we would know in other contexts, and we jump to conclusions like ‘“hwæt” must be an interjection, because there’s no way to make sense of its grammatical role in this sentence’.
I think it’s sometimes easier to see the limits of our own knowledge by comparing ourselves with someone whose knowledge isn’t so limited. The philosopher J. L. Austin, who I’ve written about before in one of these posts, had a properly preternatural ability to pick up on these subtle linguistic patterns. He could both come up with clear and plain ‘test sentences’ that illuminated the issues at play, and also generalise from them (without overgeneralising).
One of his most famous examples was ‘by accident’ versus ‘by mistake’. Actually, a test—if you have not read Austin, ask yourself right now: do you think there’s any difference between those two? If you do, can you coherently describe the difference? I bet most of you either don’t think there’s a difference, or can’t quite articulate it. But those of us who have read Austin could tell you the difference immediately, because we all remember his brilliant illustration of the difference, involving a slightly morbid tale about a donkey. If Austin had ever gone into Anglo-Saxon studies, I can almost guarantee you that he’d have figured out ‘hwæt’ decades before Walkden: he’d have just said to a colleague, ‘what about “what big teeth you have!”?’, and that would have been that.
But Austin didn’t manage to teach any of his students how to do it, and then he died young. So the rest of us are stuck grinding out an understanding of language one Old English word at a time.
Norms, ignorance, and intelligence
Obviously, there are a lot of important things to be said about the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to Minneapolis. But I’m not necessarily the person to say them—my takes are not complicated, they will not be surprising to you, others will have said them better than me. I can tell you ‘orange man bad’, and I will be right, but I’m not adding much to the discourse by doing so.
But I do think there’s something interesting in a minor sub-story: ICE agents attempted to enter the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis.
This is obviously a flagrant breach of some of the most important norms of international diplomacy, evidence of a terrifyingly entitled view of the powers of law enforcement, yada yada yada orange man bad. But there’s another way to describe it: it’s an example of someone being stupid. The ICE agent in question seems to have never heard of a consulate before. And it’s not clear that he understood what the Ecuadorian guy was saying when he was trying to explain ‘this is a consulate’ to him. The ICE agent has flouted a vitally important international norm, but not because he’s decided he doesn’t like it; he just doesn’t recognise it, and can’t understand it.
The thing is, the norms around consulates and embassies—while they are super important—are not totally trivial to understand. I’m sure the ICE agent standing there, if you had asked him why he had tried to enter the building, would have shot you and got the president to call you a terrorist told you something along the lines of ‘this is the United States of America, I am American law enforcement, I need to enter this building to enforce American law’. It is indeed kind of weird that there are bits of American soil that American law enforcement are not allowed to enter, not even with a warrant.
Of course, while this is not totally trivial to understand, it is mostly trivial. The vast majority of people have heard of embassies and consulates, and can grasp the concept: it takes a little bit of cognitive work, and a little bit of information about the world, but not very much of either. Even if you don’t know the exact contours of the relevant international law, which admittedly is a bit complicated, there are lossy approximations (e.g., the commonly-believed claim ‘a consulate is a bit of foreign soil within another country’) that are strictly-speaking false but which basically do the job.
But, sadly, there are some people who are so ignorant about the world that they have never even heard of consulates, and/or so unintelligent that they cannot even compute lossy approximations to the rules. The state can and should use education to try to make sure as few people as possible are in this situation, but the number will never get to zero. This is just a fact of life: like the poor, the unintelligent will always be with you.
But (unlike the poor), it is vitally important that you don’t let the unintelligent exercise significant discretionary power over other people. Discretionary power is of course necessary in the modern state, but if it is to be consistent with freedom, then the people who exercise it need to understand and internalise certain ideas, many of which can broadly be described as ‘liberal’. And some people are simply too ignorant to have heard of these ideas, or too unintelligent to understand them even if they are explained to them.
Part of the story of American politics at the moment (and Western politics more generally) is that there are intelligent but morally bankrupt actors who are strategically aiming to destroy vital liberal values. But another big part of the story involves actors who are just too stupid or ignorant to even understand those values, and yet have been put in positions of immense power, because the US president doesn’t care if you’re stupid and ignorant so long as you are obsequious to him. This list includes a huge number of the new ICE agents who the administration has hired, but also many figures in Trump’s inner orbit.
I have probably phrased this all in a crude and perhaps insulting way. But (a) phrased slightly more nicely, I don’t think there’s anything above that can’t be found in important nineteenth-century liberal ideas about the importance of education and of an attenuated version of republican civic virtue; and (b) if you watch the video the ICE agent, I don’t think you’ll be particularly disposed to be nice and kind. My honest reaction was ‘this ignorant fuck shouldn’t be allowed within a million miles of that kind of power’, and I think that’s right and entirely defensible.
Irish butter vouchers
Possibly the most Irish story of all time—I can’t believe I had never heard about this before.
You may be aware of the European ‘Common Agricultural Policy’, which was introduced in the 1960s and still exists today. It was ostensibly introduced in order to minimise price fluctuations in food, allowing consumers and farmers to plan ahead, and to prevent shortages and ensure ‘food security’; but this was always a paper-thin cover story. In reality it’s a series of handouts (funded by taxpayer money) given to farmers out of fear of the agriculture lobby.10 The handouts are on such a massive scale that they distort the international market for food and contribute to global poverty, by making it harder for farmers in poor countries to compete with unfairly-subsidised European food products. International poverty charities like Oxfam hate the policy for this reason: it ‘inflict[s] enormous damage on developing countries’.
I knew all about that already. But I didn’t know about the wackier consequences of the policy. In the 1970s and 1980s, the way the policy worked was farmers were given a guarantee of purchase: if they couldn’t get a high enough price for their food on the open market, the EEC agreed to step in and buy the food at those high prices. The risk of gaming the system will be immediately apparent: farmers would produce ungodly quantities of food that nobody wanted to eat, and fob it off on the EEC at high prices. Production quotas were introduced to try to prevent this. But setting quotas at a realistic level would have pissed off the farmers who were enjoying getting paid, so quotas were still set pretty high, and overproduction continued.
The result was that countries across Europe found themselves with ‘butter mountains’. I will quote Robert Toland’s summary:
Milk production was so excessive in Ireland during the 1980s most of it was processed into butter and milk powder. This contributed to the national stockpile of butter reaching 165,000 tonnes of butter in 1987… Indeed, this was a phenomenon experienced across what was then the European Economic Community as part of its Common Agricultural Policy, part of the butter glut was stored in two Greek freighters in Cork harbour in 1984.
At the same time as this, Ireland’s economy was not doing great: the Celtic Tiger had not yet got going, and unemployment was pretty extreme—in that same year of 1987, unemployment was around 18% (!).
And so some bright politician or civil servant had the idea to… uh, I’ll let Julian Gough explain:
People simply weren’t buying and eating enough butter. But Ireland’s unemployed at the time were in plentiful supply… so maybe you could, er, force-feed them butter, till the mountain was gone? And so we issued the unemployed butter vouchers, which could only be exchanged for butter.
Yup: if you signed on in southern Ireland from the late 1970s through to the 1990s, you would not get your full dole in cash; some of it would be in the form of butter.
You might reasonably think that there’s a limit to how much butter any one person might want, even if it’s being given away for free. And indeed:
Of course, a shadow economy emerged, where local shops would accept butter vouchers in exchange for cigarettes, at a steep discount to face value, and later claim the butter money from the state.
The shop across the road from my flat got too well known for this, and too popular, and was eventually caught when it was discovered to be claiming more in butter vouchers than its entire recorded sales of butter to all comers.
Julian didn’t smoke and didn’t partake in this shadow fake-butter-real-fags economy, but obviously he couldn’t eat all that butter, so he still has his butter vouchers today.
Anyway. In the 1990s and 2000s the EU largely gave up the pretence that the policy was about price stabilisation, switching away from a ‘guaranteed price’ system and towards just giving cash to farmers. This made the cynicism of the policy even more apparent, but at least it reduced the incentive to overproduce, and allowed the butter mountains to be gradually sold down. I can’t quite find an exact date for when the voucher scheme ended, but it seems to have been some point in the late 1990s.
‘Evangelical Quakers’ and the relationship of Christianity to the wider culture
I linked Ready to Harvest last month and I’m doing it again—I love his channel! In January I discovered the ‘evangelical Quakers’ through him, and I now think they’re one of the most important Christian denominations to understand the position of modern Christianity vis-a-vis wider culture and political partisanship.
We commonly talk as if liberal Christians are tending towards the beliefs and values of the wider secular culture, while evangelicals are staying put in ‘traditional’ Christian faith. This way of thinking is appealing both to liberals (who want to portray evangelicals as stick-in-the-muds unable to develop their ideas) and to evangelicals (who think liberals are abandoning the core of Christianity). On the evangelical side in particular, this story gets developed into concepts like Aaron Renn’s ‘negative world’ or Rod Dreher’s argument that Christians are akin to Soviet dissidents: the idea is that the wider culture (often referred to by evangelicals as ‘the world’, for scriptural reasons) is actively and inherently hostile to the historic tradition of Christianity; those liberals who compromise with it are abandoning Christianity itself, and evangelicals must steel themselves to oppose it entirely.
But I think the basic story is incorrect, and the evangelical Quakers help us see this. If you have never come across them, the Quakers (a.k.a. the ‘Friends’, with a capital ‘f’) have a load of really distinctive theological positions that are absolutely essential to their tradition. Most famously, they refuse to swear oaths, even in a courtroom; but they are also pacifists and oppose all war; they believe that worship should be structured around opportunities for individual believers to achieve a direct, silent, mystical revelation led by the ‘inner light’, with no pastors or priests leading the worship; and they don’t baptise.11
But the evangelical Quakers—who mostly exist in the US and Africa—often baptise with water. They usually have worship that is led by a pastor, has music and an order of service, and looks basically like any other Protestant church’s worship (there’s even an evangelical Quaker megachurch!). Some of them ‘speak in tongues’ à la Pentecostals. They compromise on pacificism, with many supporting the military and being happy for their members to serve. They’ve even weakened the rules around oaths! In general, you could read the statement of faith on the website of the Evangelical Friends Church International and not realise they were Quakers; or you could walk into an evangelical Quaker church and confuse it for pretty much any other branch of evangelical Protestantism. Not to put too fine a point on it, but evangelical Quakers think that historically central Quaker traditions are optional.
The history of how this came to be is, inevitably, complicated.12 But I might offer a brief and somewhat ahistorical intuition pump. You’ll be aware that, in right-wing American spaces, it is seen as outrageous and offensive not to ‘support the troops’. If you’re a Quaker surrounded by right-wing Americans, an insistence on the traditional Quaker approach here would cause cultural tension and awkwardness. Inevitably, some of them will manage to find a rationalisation for jettisoning pacifism, no matter how utterly essential it is to Quaker theology. (This is the exact mirror image of what has happened to Christians in left-wing circles on issues like e.g. gay marriage.)
In general, it is the liberal Quakers who are staying true to the most distinctive elements of the historic Quaker tradition, and the evangelical Quakers who are abandoning these in order to more closely assimilate to those around them. In this case, the standard story gets it backwards.
I take the lesson to be that wider culture actually has both liberal Christians and evangelical Christians in its grasp. But the ‘wider culture’ is not a single thing: in particular, in the modern day, it’s often divided along lines that correlate with politics and partisanship. Liberal Christians tend to be on the left, and so they will happily sacrifice any aspects of their theology that conflict with wider left-leaning culture. But evangelical Christians, who have overwhelmingly become right-wing since the 1980s, will just as happily jettison any aspects of their theology that conflict with wider right-leaning culture. (This is a claim about evangelical Christianity as a whole and liberal Christianity as a whole; there are obviously individual exceptions to all of these claims, but I think my theory gets the overall direction of travel correct.)
The Quakers are the clearest example I know about of this tendency, but it exists more broadly. Historical Presbyterians and Congregationalists have literally gone to war when the alternative was joining a church with bishops; but nowadays many Presbyterian and Congregationalist evangelicals would have no problem changing their attendance to go to a Methodist or Anglican church instead—so long, of course, as the new church didn’t have same-sex marriage! Many dividing lines that were vital to historic Christianity completely disappear from view; but the dividing lines that are vital to the current culture wars always remain salient.13
That mention of same-sex marriage is important. In recent years, the most salient dividing issue within Protestant Christianity has been sexuality. In this particular case, the evangelicals are the ones hewing to the historical traditions of Christianity—viz., homophobia—while the liberals are moving closer to the wider culture. The prominence of this particular issue goes a long way to explaining why so many people believe the standard story.
But evangelicals aren’t defending homophobia because they will always hold to their religious traditions, come what may. Rather, evangelicals feel comfortable in defending historical Christian homophobia in large part because they know they can be homophobic and still remain a member in good standing of right-leaning secular culture.14 Whereas for (at least) the last fifteen years, being homophobic has absolutely not been compatible with being a member in good standing of left-leaning secular culture, and so those Christians who feel a part of this culture have been pressured to give up the traditional Christian view. The dynamics of this one case are liable to confuse both Christians and outside observers about the real dynamics at play.
As you should have guessed, Hutton’s answer is the same as the answer to any question of the form ‘why is this particular aspect of European culture so weird, so consistent across Europe and yet so completely unlike what’s found elsewhere?’: it’s the Bible.
Though see criticism of one of Mayor’s signature proposals, that the idea of griffins was based on Protoceratops fossils, from Mark Witton.
And likewise for plesiosaurs / ichthyosaurs being large sea reptiles.
The book that develops this theory in most detail is An Instinct for Dragons by David P. Jones. I haven’t read it, and I don’t plan to. I don’t necessarily feel very sympathetic to the point of view of this review (the reviewer dismisses, not only Jones’ answer to the question about dragons, but the value of even asking the question in the first place; and he does it in a really snooty way, despite having basically no justification). But it is so negative about Jones’ book that there must be some signal about the book’s quality buried under the noise:
One is tempted to say, as Dorothy Parker once did, that this is a book not to be tossed aside lightly but thrown violently. But no, it is not worth spending even that much energy on.
Which is not to disparage sinological knowledge-that: Pound really did mess up a lot in his translations because he didn’t know Chinese!
I think Wood misspoke here: the poem is five hundred characters (≈ words) long, not five hundred lines.
There are lots of interjections, of course, but they tend to have some particular meaning that wouldn’t work here: ‘tut tut’, ‘phew’, ‘ugh’, ‘uh-oh’.
Well: maybe ‘what!?’, with the exclamation and question marks, is an interjection. But that is definitely not what’s going on at the start of Beowulf.
Translators into modern English who use an interjection to translate ‘hwæt’ either have to reorder the sentence to make it grammatical (bringing the verb up into the first line), or they have to change the sentence structure like Heaney does, so that the verb actually appears at the start of the second sentence.
Or, more precisely: the policy was introduced in order to buy French government support for German membership in the common market; the reason it was good for the French government was because they were chasing farming votes at home. That’s the historical story. But today it’s not so limited to France, farmers all across Europe love being propped up by taxpayer cash, and their lobbying and voting power have kept the money flowing.
Or, more precisely, they believe that baptism is a purely spiritual thing, and should not be carried out with water.
Roughly, though, the story is that—starting with the American Great Awakenings and continuing for many years—there was a continuing process by which Quakers who found themselves culturally closer to other American evangelicals would try to import evangelical ideas and practices into Quakerism. This fits with the argument I’m making in this section.
Another example: while it doesn’t make a whole load of sense to try to apply the labels ‘liberal’ and ‘evangelical’ to Catholicism, you can see something like these dynamics in how right-wing Catholics like J. D. Vance feel completely free to disavow the essentials of Catholic Social Teaching, whenever it goes against the anti-immigrant views that their secular political allies want them to hold.
The truth of this claim will obviously depend on how you specify what counts as ‘right-leaning’, but I hope you get your meaning: I’m gesturing towards something like what Scott Alexander calls ‘Red Tribe’.
Quite late to this, but "well" is used in American English the same way you say "so" is used in Northern Irish English. And in fact "so" is also used that way. I have a vague sense from speaking to my elders that "so" is a recent phenomenon. "Well" has been around the block, and sounds both young and old-fashioned at the same time. Perhaps it skipped a generation.
“My beloved Ronald Hutton” 😍