I've been hoping for something to write about that doesn't involve Scotland, religion, or constitutional history, and now I've found it. Rory McIlroy, aged 22, has just won the U.S. Open.
The media, understandably, has focused on the personal story: the son of a clubhouse barman, when he was twelve, his parents held down something like six jobs between them, to turn their back garden into an all-weather putting green where he could practice his short game.
And what a game. There's something delightful in the way he makes it look so easy. No question, he's worked hard at it, but what he's worked at is finding the natural line, the natural rhythm; developing his innate talent to the point at which, when it all clicks together, every shot is beautiful.
For years, I've struggled to convince more informed golfers with my lack of enthusiasm for Tiger Woods' game. I've struggled to explain what I think is missing in his list of course records and major titles. Now, I have an answer. I can just point to the way the lad from Holywood does it.
Or let's put it another way. The Tiger, for all his new sexual notoriety, was essentially an intensely-engineered machine, designed and built to win major titles, and to act as a walking advertisement for sponsored sportswear, luxury goods, management consultants, and Buicks. When he equaled one of Jack Nicklaus' course records, one of the old veterans quietly remarked that Jack had been playing with a considerable hangover the day he set that record. You don't really see the Tiger playing like that. The commercial sponsors who paid him a billion dollars (so they could make many billions more) wouldn't like it.
But the first thing young Rory did with the U.S. Open trophy was take it to the bar, fill it with Guinness, and use it as a very very large flagon of the black stuff.
Win.
Monday, 20 June 2011
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Scott of the... Aegean?!
I've always been a big fan of displays of proud Scottish lunacy, particularly of a battlefield variety.
I've been thinking of writing something about Lord Bernard Stewart, who led a hundred Scottish knights to conquer most of western Europe at the end of the fifteenth century - notably ending the independence of England in 1485, since when it has been ruled by a succession of Welshmen, Scotsmen, and minor German princes.
Or Colonel Jack Churchill, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar, who decided to be Scottish mainly as a matter of style, and used his claymore very effectively during the Salerno landings in World War II (he was also the last English soldier to kill enemies with a longbow during the retreat to Dunkirk).
But today, I discovered Captain George Scott and the frigate James, so I'm going to try and tell you a story that no-one's told in print from end to end before.
Origins: 1643-1645
For reasons lost to history, he came to Inverness in 1643 with some shipwrights from the south, and began to build a very large ship: "for bulk and burden, non such ever seen in our north seas", recalled the local writer John Fraser; as an awestruck schoolboy, he had followed her creation - his family probably oversaw the cutting of the wood for her hull, he would have watched her take shape on the slipway every day, and he even managed to spend some time aboard her as she prepared for her first voyage.
This great ship was called the James, and Captain Scott told the locals that he was building her as a merchant ship, but soon enough, she became a battleship - and she was one of the mightiest of the age.
In 1646, she carried forty-five guns, a potent armament by the standards of the 1640s, although her crew of 70 men was more suited for a trading voyage. By 1649, fully fitted out for war, she is said to have mounted 70 guns, which would make her one of the most powerful warships anywhere in the world.
Much depends on the weight of the roundshot fired, but a ship of 70 guns would only be equalled or surpassed by the Royal Navy's two gigantic "ships royal", the brand new HMS Sovereign of the Seas (100) and the newly-rebuilt HMS Royal Prince (70), which between them embodied all the ambition of a seventeenth-century great power; there only seem to have been around half-a-dozen more warships carrying above 45 guns in 1645, the national flagships of the other major navies.
In short, the little Highland burgh of Inverness seems to have produced something genuinely, inexplicably world-class.
By either estimate, she seems to have been the largest ship built in Scotland since the legendary Great Michael of 1512, and I don't think anything else comparable was launched north of the Border until after 1750 or even into the early nineteenth century; when she sailed into the Mediterranean, she may have been the largest fighting ship between Gibraltar and Odessa.
Perhaps we even have a picture of her, a mid-seventeenth-century portrait of a Scottish warship pierced for sixty-two guns - no other ship that served under the Scottish flag seems to have come close to this armament until the 1690s.
It's just not quite clear what she was for.
Captain Scott may have been a relative of Sir John Scott of Scotstarvit, who had made a tidy profit by financing a successful commerce-raiding frigate in the 1620s; he may have been a relative of Sir James Scott of Rossie, a soldier-of-fortune who had fought for the Venetians a few years earlier, and who would have known that the Serene Republic paid handsomely for fighting ships from northern waters.
Perhaps he simply knew about James IV's unaccomplished plan to take the Great Michael on Crusade against the Turks, and decided to fulfill the king's vow 130 years later.
Or he may have just been a merchant skipper who ended up in a military career by accident.
It's equally unclear why he built the James at Inverness. Presumably, part of the idea was that the forests of the Lovat lordship offered solid oak for hull timbers without the wartime disturbances of England, and tall fir trees for masts without the hassle of importing them from the Baltic. Perhaps he was attracted by the potential of Cromarty Bay - always underused, always recognized as the best harbour on Great Britain's North Sea coast.
Perhaps he'd heard, as scholars began to rediscover the medieval chronicles of Matthew Paris, that one of the largest ships of the medieval Crusades had been built there; perhaps he wanted to find somewhere quiet, away from the various hostile governments in Edinburgh, London, Oxford and Kilkenny, to build a big ship without the wrong people asking questions.
I don't know. After more than 360 years, I don't know if we can know. The simple story is that a man came unexpectedly to Inverness and built himself a huge battleship there, and it really speaks for itself.
And, appropriately enough, she went to sea against a backdrop of gunfire and battle.
From Inverness to the Dardanelles - 1645-1649
By April 1645, the James was ready for sea: she was anchored off the Moray coast, probably still in civilian rig, and proving quite a sensation with the locals. She was due to depart on 9th May, but while she made ready to weigh anchor that morning, two armies appeared on the misty shoreline.
Along the coast road came the Army of the Covenant, well-drilled professional regiments with pikes and muskets, fresh from the pivotal victory of the English Civil War at Marston Moor; company by company, they detached themselves down to the water's edge, firing professional salutes across the tideline to clean out their guns before the battle, then moved up in battle order towards the little town of Auldearn.
Around the old castle hill, there waited an outnumbered insurgent force of mounted knights in medieval armour, and Highland clansmen in kilts.
The passengers aboard the James - mostly supporters of the Covenant, it seems - watched the Battle of Auldearn from the main deck; they watched as the hopelessly outnumbered forces of Scottish anachronism absolutely annihilated the best modern soldiers of the era.
It's not entirely clear which side Captain Scott was on, but that afternoon, the big ship hauled up her anchor, set sail, and departed on a swift course for the south.
It seems probable that most of her seventy crewmen were local sailors: there's no mention of the James's captain bringing hands up with him from the south, and with Irish and Dutch pirates roaming the seas, the herring fisheries and the coastal trade had probably been badly disrupted. Warfare, political violence, and the threat of conscription might also make local landsmen look to the ocean for escape.
Even so, they would probably be a polyglot lot, speaking what were effectively four separate languages - the strangely accentless English of the Black Isle coast, the broad Scots of the Moray burghs, the sing-song Gaelic of the Sutherland fisher-folk, and the Dansk - the gruff old Viking dialect of Caithness and the Northern Isles.
We next hear of Captain Scott and the James on 14th August 1646, when they were officially accepted into the Venetian Navy. The seafaring Republic was anxiously building up a fleet of broadside sailing ships for a war against the Turkish Empire, and by now, the ship from Inverness was armed for battle.
It's possible that the James was already in the Mediterranean by this date, but it's not quite clear that she was. Fraser says that Captain Scott sailed south "to the Straits", and it may be that she was the Scottish frigate which subsequently appeared among the royalist privateers in the English Channel. She may equally be the James of Wemyss, which became the Covenanters' flagship in 1647 - this James certainly seems to have been a large fighting ship, an adequate replacement for the big Dutch-built raider Golden Lion, which had previously been the best ship that they had.
Presumably, she wasn't both, but I wouldn't quite rule it out.
But eventually, she certainly made her way south into the Mediterranean, and hoisted the lion of St Mark alongside the saltire cross of St Andrew.
I'll leave the explanation of what followed to Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, another wild Scottish hero - whether in the battlefield or in the dirty business of writing maths textbooks; in his Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel, an anthemic handbook to the general brilliance of crazy Scotsmen, he wrote a proud eulogium for Captain Scott (even if he does get his name slightly wrong):
Like most of Sir Thomas Urquhart's spectacular claims of Scottish brilliance, this is not actually all that inaccurate at all. The Venetian campaign drove the Turks from the Aegean in 1646 and subsequently bottled their fleet up behind the Dardanelles, and Captain Scott and the James played a major role in the war - not least in the first great Venetian victory.
The James against the Turkish Navy - 12th May 1649
In 1649, the Turkish navy slipped past the blockade, in calm weather where their oared galleys and galleasses could outpace the Venetian galleons and great ships; but the soldiers aboard the Turkish ships objected to the idea of a sea battle, and insisted on taking up a defensive position on the coastline; perhaps, as Urquhart said, the James had put them off serving as marines.
They moved to the ancient fortified harbour of Phocaea, on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, and awaited their opponents.
On 12th May, the Venetian fleet found them; but their admiral, Giacomo di Riva, had problems of his own.
The Dutch ships which formed the main strength of his fleet refused to fight unless they could take out insurance, and most of them gave little help in the battle even when they got it; the English ship Experience left the fleet without so much as an apology, one of the Italian ships surrendered before the battle began, and a French one managed to sail straight into the beach.
That left the Venetians with an effective squadron of just four real ships of war, plus one small scout; they were facing a Turkish force of eleven galleons, ten galleasses, and seventy-two galleys, occupying a strong defended position.
But one of their four ships was the James, with Captain Scott and his crew of seventy brave men from Inverness; and it was the Scots that led the advance into the fortified harbour.
The official reports of their contribution to the battle are written in raptures, but they ring true even in Italian: Captain Scott "strenuously performed every duty that could be desired of him", and his ship "performed the most marvelous feats of valour and skill".
She set herself in the thick of the fighting; she sent crippling broadsides into the Turkish flagship, sank one enemy galleass, captured another, and fought off a determined boarding attack by a third; at this point, the admiring Venetian admiral diverted his flagship to force the Turkish attacker off; and all the while, the Scottish ship's boats were rowing back and forward through the battle, rescuing the shackled galley slaves from amid the wreckage and the broadsides.
It was a dramatic victory, leaving the Turks with just one ship and six light galleasses, while their galley fleet had scattered and fled; but it also left the James dismasted and hulled below the waterline. She reached a safe anchorage at the pirate island of Andros, but on the night of 23rd May, she began to take on water through her battle-damaged timbers, and settled at the bottom of the harbour.
Two days earlier, the disgruntled Turkish janissaries had returned to Istanbul, and promptly murdered their prime minister. They disposed of the next one the next year, when he tried to send them back into another naval campaign. Meanwhile, the senior officer who remained with the fleet had refused an admiral's flag and transferred to a shore assignment. I'm not sure if he took up camel driving, but Urquhart is, again, broadly right.
Aftermath: 1649-1652
Captain Scott may have returned briefly to home waters - a frigate called the Scott appears in the royalist fleet later in the year, big, fast and heavily-armed; he certainly took advantage of the insurance cover that the Admiral had grudgingly given to the Dutch, to ask the Venetian government for 35,000 reals in compensation for the loss of the James: but if he did leave the Venetian fleet for a while, he soon returned to it.
The Turks had acquired a new navy of Barbary pirates and English Roundheads, and Captain George Scott died in the defense of the great Venetian fortress base at Candia on Crete, of a fever that seems to have been brought on by his military exertions - Fraser says it was in 1652, while Urquhart implies a date in 1651.
The Venetians were so impressed by the sacrifice and heroism of this Scottish adventurer and his big ship from Inverness that they erected a monument in their honour; a marble statue of the brave George Scott, standing proudly on the banks of the Grand Canal.
And beneath the warm blue waters of Andros harbour, overlooked by the bright while buildings of a little Greek village, the Mediterranean clay holds buried fir and oak hewn down in Glenmoriston, and wrought into a ship on the shores of the Beaulay Firth - a corner of a foreign port, that is forever Scotland.
I've been thinking of writing something about Lord Bernard Stewart, who led a hundred Scottish knights to conquer most of western Europe at the end of the fifteenth century - notably ending the independence of England in 1485, since when it has been ruled by a succession of Welshmen, Scotsmen, and minor German princes.
Or Colonel Jack Churchill, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar, who decided to be Scottish mainly as a matter of style, and used his claymore very effectively during the Salerno landings in World War II (he was also the last English soldier to kill enemies with a longbow during the retreat to Dunkirk).
But today, I discovered Captain George Scott and the frigate James, so I'm going to try and tell you a story that no-one's told in print from end to end before.
Origins: 1643-1645
For reasons lost to history, he came to Inverness in 1643 with some shipwrights from the south, and began to build a very large ship: "for bulk and burden, non such ever seen in our north seas", recalled the local writer John Fraser; as an awestruck schoolboy, he had followed her creation - his family probably oversaw the cutting of the wood for her hull, he would have watched her take shape on the slipway every day, and he even managed to spend some time aboard her as she prepared for her first voyage.
This great ship was called the James, and Captain Scott told the locals that he was building her as a merchant ship, but soon enough, she became a battleship - and she was one of the mightiest of the age.
In 1646, she carried forty-five guns, a potent armament by the standards of the 1640s, although her crew of 70 men was more suited for a trading voyage. By 1649, fully fitted out for war, she is said to have mounted 70 guns, which would make her one of the most powerful warships anywhere in the world.
Much depends on the weight of the roundshot fired, but a ship of 70 guns would only be equalled or surpassed by the Royal Navy's two gigantic "ships royal", the brand new HMS Sovereign of the Seas (100) and the newly-rebuilt HMS Royal Prince (70), which between them embodied all the ambition of a seventeenth-century great power; there only seem to have been around half-a-dozen more warships carrying above 45 guns in 1645, the national flagships of the other major navies.
In short, the little Highland burgh of Inverness seems to have produced something genuinely, inexplicably world-class.
By either estimate, she seems to have been the largest ship built in Scotland since the legendary Great Michael of 1512, and I don't think anything else comparable was launched north of the Border until after 1750 or even into the early nineteenth century; when she sailed into the Mediterranean, she may have been the largest fighting ship between Gibraltar and Odessa.
Perhaps we even have a picture of her, a mid-seventeenth-century portrait of a Scottish warship pierced for sixty-two guns - no other ship that served under the Scottish flag seems to have come close to this armament until the 1690s.
It's just not quite clear what she was for.
Captain Scott may have been a relative of Sir John Scott of Scotstarvit, who had made a tidy profit by financing a successful commerce-raiding frigate in the 1620s; he may have been a relative of Sir James Scott of Rossie, a soldier-of-fortune who had fought for the Venetians a few years earlier, and who would have known that the Serene Republic paid handsomely for fighting ships from northern waters.
Perhaps he simply knew about James IV's unaccomplished plan to take the Great Michael on Crusade against the Turks, and decided to fulfill the king's vow 130 years later.
Or he may have just been a merchant skipper who ended up in a military career by accident.
It's equally unclear why he built the James at Inverness. Presumably, part of the idea was that the forests of the Lovat lordship offered solid oak for hull timbers without the wartime disturbances of England, and tall fir trees for masts without the hassle of importing them from the Baltic. Perhaps he was attracted by the potential of Cromarty Bay - always underused, always recognized as the best harbour on Great Britain's North Sea coast.
Perhaps he'd heard, as scholars began to rediscover the medieval chronicles of Matthew Paris, that one of the largest ships of the medieval Crusades had been built there; perhaps he wanted to find somewhere quiet, away from the various hostile governments in Edinburgh, London, Oxford and Kilkenny, to build a big ship without the wrong people asking questions.
I don't know. After more than 360 years, I don't know if we can know. The simple story is that a man came unexpectedly to Inverness and built himself a huge battleship there, and it really speaks for itself.
And, appropriately enough, she went to sea against a backdrop of gunfire and battle.
From Inverness to the Dardanelles - 1645-1649
By April 1645, the James was ready for sea: she was anchored off the Moray coast, probably still in civilian rig, and proving quite a sensation with the locals. She was due to depart on 9th May, but while she made ready to weigh anchor that morning, two armies appeared on the misty shoreline.
Along the coast road came the Army of the Covenant, well-drilled professional regiments with pikes and muskets, fresh from the pivotal victory of the English Civil War at Marston Moor; company by company, they detached themselves down to the water's edge, firing professional salutes across the tideline to clean out their guns before the battle, then moved up in battle order towards the little town of Auldearn.
Around the old castle hill, there waited an outnumbered insurgent force of mounted knights in medieval armour, and Highland clansmen in kilts.
The passengers aboard the James - mostly supporters of the Covenant, it seems - watched the Battle of Auldearn from the main deck; they watched as the hopelessly outnumbered forces of Scottish anachronism absolutely annihilated the best modern soldiers of the era.
It's not entirely clear which side Captain Scott was on, but that afternoon, the big ship hauled up her anchor, set sail, and departed on a swift course for the south.
It seems probable that most of her seventy crewmen were local sailors: there's no mention of the James's captain bringing hands up with him from the south, and with Irish and Dutch pirates roaming the seas, the herring fisheries and the coastal trade had probably been badly disrupted. Warfare, political violence, and the threat of conscription might also make local landsmen look to the ocean for escape.
Even so, they would probably be a polyglot lot, speaking what were effectively four separate languages - the strangely accentless English of the Black Isle coast, the broad Scots of the Moray burghs, the sing-song Gaelic of the Sutherland fisher-folk, and the Dansk - the gruff old Viking dialect of Caithness and the Northern Isles.
We next hear of Captain Scott and the James on 14th August 1646, when they were officially accepted into the Venetian Navy. The seafaring Republic was anxiously building up a fleet of broadside sailing ships for a war against the Turkish Empire, and by now, the ship from Inverness was armed for battle.
It's possible that the James was already in the Mediterranean by this date, but it's not quite clear that she was. Fraser says that Captain Scott sailed south "to the Straits", and it may be that she was the Scottish frigate which subsequently appeared among the royalist privateers in the English Channel. She may equally be the James of Wemyss, which became the Covenanters' flagship in 1647 - this James certainly seems to have been a large fighting ship, an adequate replacement for the big Dutch-built raider Golden Lion, which had previously been the best ship that they had.
Presumably, she wasn't both, but I wouldn't quite rule it out.
But eventually, she certainly made her way south into the Mediterranean, and hoisted the lion of St Mark alongside the saltire cross of St Andrew.
I'll leave the explanation of what followed to Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, another wild Scottish hero - whether in the battlefield or in the dirty business of writing maths textbooks; in his Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel, an anthemic handbook to the general brilliance of crazy Scotsmen, he wrote a proud eulogium for Captain Scott (even if he does get his name slightly wrong):
Nor can I well forget that sea-captain, Captain William Scot, whose martiall atchievements in the defence of that State against the Turks, may very well admit him to be ranked amongst the colonels; he was vice-admiral to the Venetian Fleet, and the onely renowned bane and terror of Mahometan navigators ; whether they had galleys, galeoons, galiegrosses, or huge war ships, it was all one to him; he set upon all alike, saying still, The more they were, the manyer he would kill; and the stronger that the encounter should happen to be, the greater would be his honour, and his prise the richer. He oftentimes so cleared the Archipelago of the Mussulmans, that the Ottoman family at the very gates of Constantinople would quake at the report of his victories; and did so ferret them out of all the creeks of the Adriatick gulph, and so shrewdly put them to it, that sometimes they did not know in what part of the Mediterranean they might best shelter themselves from the fury of his blows. Many of their mariners turned land-souldiers for fear of him; and of their maritime officers, several took charge of caravans to escape his hand, which for many yeers together lay so heavy upon them, that he was cryed up for another Don Jean d' Austria, or Duke d' Orea, by the enemies of that Scythian generation; in spight of which, and the rancour of all their unchristian hearts, he dyed but some eighteen moneths ago in his bed, of a feaver, in the Isle of Candia.
Like most of Sir Thomas Urquhart's spectacular claims of Scottish brilliance, this is not actually all that inaccurate at all. The Venetian campaign drove the Turks from the Aegean in 1646 and subsequently bottled their fleet up behind the Dardanelles, and Captain Scott and the James played a major role in the war - not least in the first great Venetian victory.
The James against the Turkish Navy - 12th May 1649
In 1649, the Turkish navy slipped past the blockade, in calm weather where their oared galleys and galleasses could outpace the Venetian galleons and great ships; but the soldiers aboard the Turkish ships objected to the idea of a sea battle, and insisted on taking up a defensive position on the coastline; perhaps, as Urquhart said, the James had put them off serving as marines.
They moved to the ancient fortified harbour of Phocaea, on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, and awaited their opponents.
On 12th May, the Venetian fleet found them; but their admiral, Giacomo di Riva, had problems of his own.
The Dutch ships which formed the main strength of his fleet refused to fight unless they could take out insurance, and most of them gave little help in the battle even when they got it; the English ship Experience left the fleet without so much as an apology, one of the Italian ships surrendered before the battle began, and a French one managed to sail straight into the beach.
That left the Venetians with an effective squadron of just four real ships of war, plus one small scout; they were facing a Turkish force of eleven galleons, ten galleasses, and seventy-two galleys, occupying a strong defended position.
But one of their four ships was the James, with Captain Scott and his crew of seventy brave men from Inverness; and it was the Scots that led the advance into the fortified harbour.
The official reports of their contribution to the battle are written in raptures, but they ring true even in Italian: Captain Scott "strenuously performed every duty that could be desired of him", and his ship "performed the most marvelous feats of valour and skill".
She set herself in the thick of the fighting; she sent crippling broadsides into the Turkish flagship, sank one enemy galleass, captured another, and fought off a determined boarding attack by a third; at this point, the admiring Venetian admiral diverted his flagship to force the Turkish attacker off; and all the while, the Scottish ship's boats were rowing back and forward through the battle, rescuing the shackled galley slaves from amid the wreckage and the broadsides.
It was a dramatic victory, leaving the Turks with just one ship and six light galleasses, while their galley fleet had scattered and fled; but it also left the James dismasted and hulled below the waterline. She reached a safe anchorage at the pirate island of Andros, but on the night of 23rd May, she began to take on water through her battle-damaged timbers, and settled at the bottom of the harbour.
Two days earlier, the disgruntled Turkish janissaries had returned to Istanbul, and promptly murdered their prime minister. They disposed of the next one the next year, when he tried to send them back into another naval campaign. Meanwhile, the senior officer who remained with the fleet had refused an admiral's flag and transferred to a shore assignment. I'm not sure if he took up camel driving, but Urquhart is, again, broadly right.
Aftermath: 1649-1652
Captain Scott may have returned briefly to home waters - a frigate called the Scott appears in the royalist fleet later in the year, big, fast and heavily-armed; he certainly took advantage of the insurance cover that the Admiral had grudgingly given to the Dutch, to ask the Venetian government for 35,000 reals in compensation for the loss of the James: but if he did leave the Venetian fleet for a while, he soon returned to it.
The Turks had acquired a new navy of Barbary pirates and English Roundheads, and Captain George Scott died in the defense of the great Venetian fortress base at Candia on Crete, of a fever that seems to have been brought on by his military exertions - Fraser says it was in 1652, while Urquhart implies a date in 1651.
The Venetians were so impressed by the sacrifice and heroism of this Scottish adventurer and his big ship from Inverness that they erected a monument in their honour; a marble statue of the brave George Scott, standing proudly on the banks of the Grand Canal.
And beneath the warm blue waters of Andros harbour, overlooked by the bright while buildings of a little Greek village, the Mediterranean clay holds buried fir and oak hewn down in Glenmoriston, and wrought into a ship on the shores of the Beaulay Firth - a corner of a foreign port, that is forever Scotland.
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Heavendrift...
It's another snowy day in Edinburgh.
Several inches of frosted snow cover the ground, with the bright, crystaline solidity of a thick layer of icing sugar. The air is bracingly cold, and the open sky is a perfect, cloudless blue. Beneath the blankets of snow, there is an impressive hardness, a geological pattern of stone and wood and icy water.
Every day seems different, though. Today, we have clear skies and there's a wintry stillness to the settled snow; tomorrow, a hint of pink cloud suggests we may be in for a blizzard; and that's just the start of it - sending me searching for words to describe this marvelous weather. Sitting with a big dictionary and a warm fire, I've been exploring the language of snow, something that we seem to have almost lost in recent decades.
Over the weekend, we had big, soft snowflakes - or flichts or flocks, as they're called in Scots, catching the etymological connection with flight that's been rather lost in standard English. You know the type - the light, feathery, fragile-seeming kind, which ride slowly from the sky like eiderdown.
There's also flindrikin snow, which is thin and light and fluttery - either like butterfly wings or white lace, the dictionary isn't sure; but either way, the word seems very appropriate.
First, though, there was a type of snow that the weather professionals refer to by the German name graupel, a name which seems to mean "barley-like". This is created when snow passes through moisture in the air, and the water vapour freezes around each snowflake, turning them into fragile pellets - hence the rather misleading name of "soft hail".
But it's not really satisfying to use a loan-word auf Deutsch or the underwhelming "soft hail", and there's no evidence of an English nauralization like "grapple". So what do we call this?!
There's one dictionary reference to "bullets" as a Scots term for "frozen snow" in 1914, but the nearest word in regular use is "moor", which describes a heavy fall of powdery snow. The graupel was certainly "mooring", to use the verbal form that seems rather more common than the noun - coming heavy and fast, in drifts through the sky.
I went for a walk in a blizzard a few days ago, and detoured into the Botanic Gardens. The cafes were shut, but the art gallery in Inverleith House was open, and the paths had been cleared with a little snow-plough - seemingly the only one in Edinburgh that actually works. And as I walked, I watched the snow come mooring through the trees in a tumbling whirl, to add to the deep snow already fast on the ground.
But "moor" isn't quite mainstream Scots - it belongs to the Viking dialect of the Northern Isles, which sit at the intersection of Atlantic and North Sea weather systems. I've seen driving snowstorms and shirt-sleeve summer sunshine alternate in five-minute intervals on Orkney, so this is probably a good place for the unusual combination of cloud levels that produces graupel.
In Edinburgh, however, I suspect the cause was the vapour trails from planes at the airport. It certainly disappeared when the snow shut down the runways. So "moor" doesn't seem quite appropriate for this post-modern snow.
But while I'm still looking for a better word than graupel, Scots has another word for the dramatic way this snow was falling: "yowdendrift".
In contrast to an "erdrift", an 'earth-drift' or normal snowdrift, a "yowdendrift" is a heavy, blown fall of snow that's swept down out of the sky like a snowdrift from on high. This is another word that confuses the specialists, with the Scots National Dictionary suggesting it derives from our language's equivalent of 'yielded', which doesn't make much sense.
I prefer an alternative kenning of my own, based on the earliest recorded form, ewindrift (c. 1650), the only citation before the last years of the eighteenth century; this looks like 'heaven-drift' (Older Scots "hewin"), and as such, it seems to fit in a pair with "erdrift", gives an accurate sense of how the snow comes billowing in from on high... and is quite simply a rather lovely word.
Several inches of frosted snow cover the ground, with the bright, crystaline solidity of a thick layer of icing sugar. The air is bracingly cold, and the open sky is a perfect, cloudless blue. Beneath the blankets of snow, there is an impressive hardness, a geological pattern of stone and wood and icy water.
Every day seems different, though. Today, we have clear skies and there's a wintry stillness to the settled snow; tomorrow, a hint of pink cloud suggests we may be in for a blizzard; and that's just the start of it - sending me searching for words to describe this marvelous weather. Sitting with a big dictionary and a warm fire, I've been exploring the language of snow, something that we seem to have almost lost in recent decades.
Over the weekend, we had big, soft snowflakes - or flichts or flocks, as they're called in Scots, catching the etymological connection with flight that's been rather lost in standard English. You know the type - the light, feathery, fragile-seeming kind, which ride slowly from the sky like eiderdown.
There's also flindrikin snow, which is thin and light and fluttery - either like butterfly wings or white lace, the dictionary isn't sure; but either way, the word seems very appropriate.
First, though, there was a type of snow that the weather professionals refer to by the German name graupel, a name which seems to mean "barley-like". This is created when snow passes through moisture in the air, and the water vapour freezes around each snowflake, turning them into fragile pellets - hence the rather misleading name of "soft hail".
But it's not really satisfying to use a loan-word auf Deutsch or the underwhelming "soft hail", and there's no evidence of an English nauralization like "grapple". So what do we call this?!
There's one dictionary reference to "bullets" as a Scots term for "frozen snow" in 1914, but the nearest word in regular use is "moor", which describes a heavy fall of powdery snow. The graupel was certainly "mooring", to use the verbal form that seems rather more common than the noun - coming heavy and fast, in drifts through the sky.
I went for a walk in a blizzard a few days ago, and detoured into the Botanic Gardens. The cafes were shut, but the art gallery in Inverleith House was open, and the paths had been cleared with a little snow-plough - seemingly the only one in Edinburgh that actually works. And as I walked, I watched the snow come mooring through the trees in a tumbling whirl, to add to the deep snow already fast on the ground.
But "moor" isn't quite mainstream Scots - it belongs to the Viking dialect of the Northern Isles, which sit at the intersection of Atlantic and North Sea weather systems. I've seen driving snowstorms and shirt-sleeve summer sunshine alternate in five-minute intervals on Orkney, so this is probably a good place for the unusual combination of cloud levels that produces graupel.
In Edinburgh, however, I suspect the cause was the vapour trails from planes at the airport. It certainly disappeared when the snow shut down the runways. So "moor" doesn't seem quite appropriate for this post-modern snow.
But while I'm still looking for a better word than graupel, Scots has another word for the dramatic way this snow was falling: "yowdendrift".
In contrast to an "erdrift", an 'earth-drift' or normal snowdrift, a "yowdendrift" is a heavy, blown fall of snow that's swept down out of the sky like a snowdrift from on high. This is another word that confuses the specialists, with the Scots National Dictionary suggesting it derives from our language's equivalent of 'yielded', which doesn't make much sense.
I prefer an alternative kenning of my own, based on the earliest recorded form, ewindrift (c. 1650), the only citation before the last years of the eighteenth century; this looks like 'heaven-drift' (Older Scots "hewin"), and as such, it seems to fit in a pair with "erdrift", gives an accurate sense of how the snow comes billowing in from on high... and is quite simply a rather lovely word.
Sunday, 14 November 2010
We Shall Remember Them
Today was Remembrance Sunday, the day the British people stand in silence in front of their TV sets, to remember the sacrifices of the war dead. The rhythms of the morning service are familiar. The Queen, wreaths of poppies, soldiers at the Cenotaph, the Bishop of London in his white cassock and red-and-black choir hood.
But before all that, two minutes' silence. The bells of Big Ben tolled eleven times.
As the bells fell silent, I looked back in my mind's eye, imagining the soldiers of World War I, black-and-white in their steel hats and gaiters, faces grainy with stubble or mud or just exhaustion.
I remember them.
"Ere, can I have a cigarette?" The voice is from a soldier on my right, with the definite twang of East End London. I turn, not quite meeting his eye, and fumble in my left top pocket for a fag. (It does not occur to me that I do not smoke, have only had six ciggies in my life, never carried a packet of fags.)
I hesitate, uncertain. A part of me feels a single ciggy is a paltry gift for a man in his position. A part of me worries about breaking the barriers of class and situation. Reality trembles on the edge of my perception.
The pack of fags I find in my hand is modern, its colors standing out against the muted palate of the vision (the colours of the Bishop of London's robes) but it feels right to hand over. I've smoked a little less than a third of them.
Now the past resumes. I walk along the trench, seeing the way the parapet sways a little to the left ahead of me, out into no-man's land. (The sky is blue above the mud, the clear hazy colour the French call horizon gray, and which Earl Haig described in his war diary on the last day of the War.)
I will only remember those details later.
Perhaps there is a tree on the horizon, or a brave hawk fluttering above.
I look down.
My revolver is in my right hand now, a heavy service Webbley with a green rope lanyard on the end. I see the scalloped trim on my left sleeve, and the three diamond buttons of my cuffs, the lighter fabric of my best-uniform breeches contrasting with the khaki jacket.
The past ends. Later, I will realise that the next sound should be the whistles, the echoing, piping signal to send the army over the top, into No Man's Land, towards the barbed wire and the Germans.
They say you wake up when you die in your dreams.
In the real world, the Two Minutes' Silence continues in crisp modern colour; I have seen the Cenotaph in tree-lined Westminster, three military flags with gilded victors' wreaths; I watch the Household Cavalry in their plumes and cloaks. A gun sounds across a London park, and the buglers blow Reveille.
It is 11:02 am.
But before all that, two minutes' silence. The bells of Big Ben tolled eleven times.
As the bells fell silent, I looked back in my mind's eye, imagining the soldiers of World War I, black-and-white in their steel hats and gaiters, faces grainy with stubble or mud or just exhaustion.
I remember them.
"Ere, can I have a cigarette?" The voice is from a soldier on my right, with the definite twang of East End London. I turn, not quite meeting his eye, and fumble in my left top pocket for a fag. (It does not occur to me that I do not smoke, have only had six ciggies in my life, never carried a packet of fags.)
I hesitate, uncertain. A part of me feels a single ciggy is a paltry gift for a man in his position. A part of me worries about breaking the barriers of class and situation. Reality trembles on the edge of my perception.
The pack of fags I find in my hand is modern, its colors standing out against the muted palate of the vision (the colours of the Bishop of London's robes) but it feels right to hand over. I've smoked a little less than a third of them.
Now the past resumes. I walk along the trench, seeing the way the parapet sways a little to the left ahead of me, out into no-man's land. (The sky is blue above the mud, the clear hazy colour the French call horizon gray, and which Earl Haig described in his war diary on the last day of the War.)
I will only remember those details later.
Perhaps there is a tree on the horizon, or a brave hawk fluttering above.
I look down.
My revolver is in my right hand now, a heavy service Webbley with a green rope lanyard on the end. I see the scalloped trim on my left sleeve, and the three diamond buttons of my cuffs, the lighter fabric of my best-uniform breeches contrasting with the khaki jacket.
The past ends. Later, I will realise that the next sound should be the whistles, the echoing, piping signal to send the army over the top, into No Man's Land, towards the barbed wire and the Germans.
They say you wake up when you die in your dreams.
In the real world, the Two Minutes' Silence continues in crisp modern colour; I have seen the Cenotaph in tree-lined Westminster, three military flags with gilded victors' wreaths; I watch the Household Cavalry in their plumes and cloaks. A gun sounds across a London park, and the buglers blow Reveille.
It is 11:02 am.
Friday, 13 August 2010
Edinburgh Art Festival - Modern Art Gallery
What you see is where you’re at—Part 3
(Modern Art Gallery, until 12th December and after)
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art was fifty years old on Friday, and to celebrate, it gave away free cake and balloons all day. This populist, feel-good moment fits perfectly with the mood of the Gallery in its anniversary year, with its defining commission from Turner Prize winner Martin Creed—a bright neon inscription that transforms the strict classical pediment of the entrance, Everything Is Going To Be Alright.
The collection inside is also a lot of fun—the third phase of the year-long What you see is where you’re at project that has taken over the entire SNGMA for its jubilee year, showing off the gallery space and displaying diverse elements of the collection with real wit and intelligence. The central hall opposite the entrance has been given over to a set of dramatically oversized kitchen furniture – a towering table and chairs, paradoxically childlike in their robust proportions.
At once ubiquitously ordinary and monumentally sculptural, this work by American artist Robert Therrien fits unexpectedly well into the distinctly Scottish space of the gallery, juxtaposed dramatically with the dining-room formality of the tall windows, high ceiling, and grey stone fireplace.
This is the latest of the Artists Rooms, showpieces from the seminal collection sold to the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate by London gallery owner Anthony d’Offay. The simple shapes and their glossy black finish also reflect one of the key themes that recurs in this year’s Art Festival—an emphasis on flat, bright shiny surfaces, a visual simplicity this work emphasises by being ironically named No Title.
In the south wing, you can find something even better, arguably the best of the current displays—a room full of Russian abstract art from a century ago, centred on a series of Kandinsky prints. These have a modernism that is still fresh and exciting—the freshness of a brand-new visual language, its lines not yet fixed into predictable patterns by familiarity. The Gallery is worth a visit for these alone.
Juxtaposed with them in the corridor is a series of small paintings by the Scottish Colourists. These date from the same era as the Kandinskys, and they are pretty in their way, but distinctly conservative in contrast with what was going on in Czarist Russia at the time—although I was nicely surprised by a subtly surrealist early offering from Alberto Morrocco, sneaked in among them. The south wing is rounded off by a small room devoted to the still life, combining realist works with some abstract pieces to provide an engaging narrative; conceptual art done well, by actually building it around real content, and showing that content in a new way—this sums up the sense of fun and lightly-held knowledge that pervades the revamped gallery.
The north wing is showing important new work by the Boyle family, based on detailed surveys of the landscape and the elements on a beach on the isle of Barra, planned since the 1970s and created over a span of eighteen years. It’s all very professional and conceptual, but for me, it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Nonetheless, precisely beause there seemed to be something missing, I found this reproduction of reality unexpectedly exciting. I couldn’t see anything here beyond critical theory and scientific reproduction, and that made me intimately aware of the necessity of expressing something else, making this an inspiring – unintended? – statement of What Art Is Really All About.
Next door, it’s great to see Duane Hanson’s Tourists back where they belong—long-term fans will known them as the loud American couple who used to stand in the corner of the main gallery space. They’re offset by John de Andrea’s Model in Repose, a superrealist nude that was intended to embody timeless beauty, and has also become a subtle—unintended?—meditation on the passage of time.
Upstairs, the themes repeat. An Artists Rooms exhibtion by Gilbert and George is a riot of glossy colour – I found it unoffensive rather than inspiring, reprising the fashions of this year’s Festival, and also comparable to the safe prettiness of the Colourists; but it’s something the media and tourists up from London for the Festival will recognize. Elsewhere on this floor, you can find an iconic Ray Liechenstein, a superb Bonnard, and two more conceptual rooms, like the still life gallery downstairs—one explores the use of texture, while the other investigates the deceptive simplicity of white paint.
Also upstairs, there is an exhibition of paintings chosen by Elizabeth Blackadder—continuing a season in which major figures in Scottish art make personal selections of work from the Gallery collection. Essentially, this is a homage by an artist to her mentors and heroes, a biographical retrospective of her own artistic influences—a “who’s who” of Scottish and European painting over the past century.
On a purely visual level, I found this less exciting than the earlier selection by Callum Innes, but it hints at the quiet emotions of unspoken memories, and the visual narrative is enlivened by unexpected choices – such as a youthful Futurist foray by Stanley Cursiter, better known to me as an artist of watercolour landscapes and Establishment portraits.
Compared with the “greatest hits” collection of surrealism in the Dean Gallery across the road, the SNGMA’s latest exhibits are more varied—for my taste, there are even a few genuine duds here; but that diversity represents Art in Scotland, and the wide audience that this exhibition is open to. The sheer variety on offer here demands a visit.
The cake in the cafe is also excellent—along with the Douglas Gordon in the stairwell.
(Modern Art Gallery, until 12th December and after)
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art was fifty years old on Friday, and to celebrate, it gave away free cake and balloons all day. This populist, feel-good moment fits perfectly with the mood of the Gallery in its anniversary year, with its defining commission from Turner Prize winner Martin Creed—a bright neon inscription that transforms the strict classical pediment of the entrance, Everything Is Going To Be Alright.
The collection inside is also a lot of fun—the third phase of the year-long What you see is where you’re at project that has taken over the entire SNGMA for its jubilee year, showing off the gallery space and displaying diverse elements of the collection with real wit and intelligence. The central hall opposite the entrance has been given over to a set of dramatically oversized kitchen furniture – a towering table and chairs, paradoxically childlike in their robust proportions.
At once ubiquitously ordinary and monumentally sculptural, this work by American artist Robert Therrien fits unexpectedly well into the distinctly Scottish space of the gallery, juxtaposed dramatically with the dining-room formality of the tall windows, high ceiling, and grey stone fireplace.
This is the latest of the Artists Rooms, showpieces from the seminal collection sold to the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate by London gallery owner Anthony d’Offay. The simple shapes and their glossy black finish also reflect one of the key themes that recurs in this year’s Art Festival—an emphasis on flat, bright shiny surfaces, a visual simplicity this work emphasises by being ironically named No Title.
In the south wing, you can find something even better, arguably the best of the current displays—a room full of Russian abstract art from a century ago, centred on a series of Kandinsky prints. These have a modernism that is still fresh and exciting—the freshness of a brand-new visual language, its lines not yet fixed into predictable patterns by familiarity. The Gallery is worth a visit for these alone.
Juxtaposed with them in the corridor is a series of small paintings by the Scottish Colourists. These date from the same era as the Kandinskys, and they are pretty in their way, but distinctly conservative in contrast with what was going on in Czarist Russia at the time—although I was nicely surprised by a subtly surrealist early offering from Alberto Morrocco, sneaked in among them. The south wing is rounded off by a small room devoted to the still life, combining realist works with some abstract pieces to provide an engaging narrative; conceptual art done well, by actually building it around real content, and showing that content in a new way—this sums up the sense of fun and lightly-held knowledge that pervades the revamped gallery.
The north wing is showing important new work by the Boyle family, based on detailed surveys of the landscape and the elements on a beach on the isle of Barra, planned since the 1970s and created over a span of eighteen years. It’s all very professional and conceptual, but for me, it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Nonetheless, precisely beause there seemed to be something missing, I found this reproduction of reality unexpectedly exciting. I couldn’t see anything here beyond critical theory and scientific reproduction, and that made me intimately aware of the necessity of expressing something else, making this an inspiring – unintended? – statement of What Art Is Really All About.
Next door, it’s great to see Duane Hanson’s Tourists back where they belong—long-term fans will known them as the loud American couple who used to stand in the corner of the main gallery space. They’re offset by John de Andrea’s Model in Repose, a superrealist nude that was intended to embody timeless beauty, and has also become a subtle—unintended?—meditation on the passage of time.
Upstairs, the themes repeat. An Artists Rooms exhibtion by Gilbert and George is a riot of glossy colour – I found it unoffensive rather than inspiring, reprising the fashions of this year’s Festival, and also comparable to the safe prettiness of the Colourists; but it’s something the media and tourists up from London for the Festival will recognize. Elsewhere on this floor, you can find an iconic Ray Liechenstein, a superb Bonnard, and two more conceptual rooms, like the still life gallery downstairs—one explores the use of texture, while the other investigates the deceptive simplicity of white paint.
Also upstairs, there is an exhibition of paintings chosen by Elizabeth Blackadder—continuing a season in which major figures in Scottish art make personal selections of work from the Gallery collection. Essentially, this is a homage by an artist to her mentors and heroes, a biographical retrospective of her own artistic influences—a “who’s who” of Scottish and European painting over the past century.
On a purely visual level, I found this less exciting than the earlier selection by Callum Innes, but it hints at the quiet emotions of unspoken memories, and the visual narrative is enlivened by unexpected choices – such as a youthful Futurist foray by Stanley Cursiter, better known to me as an artist of watercolour landscapes and Establishment portraits.
Compared with the “greatest hits” collection of surrealism in the Dean Gallery across the road, the SNGMA’s latest exhibits are more varied—for my taste, there are even a few genuine duds here; but that diversity represents Art in Scotland, and the wide audience that this exhibition is open to. The sheer variety on offer here demands a visit.
The cake in the cafe is also excellent—along with the Douglas Gordon in the stairwell.
Saturday, 24 July 2010
A Layman's Guide, part 1: The Lord's Prayer
This is intended as the first in a series of sketch posts exploring the basic texts and tenets of Christianity. These are designed mainly to help me set my own thoughts in order.
It begins as an address to God that proclaims the holiness and authority of the Creator, and then becomes a prayer for "us", paired with a reminder to be kind and generous to others. In so doing, it serves to express the two Great Commandments - to love and honour God, and to our neighbours as ourselves (Mark 12.18-34, Matt. 22.34-40). In its simplicity, it seems straightforward and economical.
Yet if you look closely, there is a depth of complexity in this short, familiar prayer. The most obvious question is why there's a section I've printed in brackets - this is a type of prayer coda, known as the doxology (Gk. doxologos, "statement of glory"). It represents a very early textual variant in the text of Matthew, but it leads into wider topics about the development of the New Testament, which I want to discuss more in a later sketch - so for now, it's simply enough to note that the Lord's Prayer was used in diverse ways from a very early date: some Christians integrated the concluding doxology, while others didn't use it at all.
There are also two very hard-to-translate words in the underlying Greek text: firstly, the word usually rendered as "daily", which in Greek is epiousion, a very unusual word that means literally "more than immediate"; it is not wrong to understand this as "daily", but there is something more here, a mysteriousness that is sensed but not fully explained - something that is captured in the technical Latin translation, supersubstantialem. This is a word that reminds us that God's presence in reality is more than we can understand or define, and anticipates the mysterious reality of Christ's presence in the bread of the Sacrament.
The second unusual choice of words is the references to "trespasses", which would be more accurately translated "debts" or "legal obligations". Luke, but not Matthew or the liturgical version, has a different word for our own "trespasses", meaning more explicitly "faults" or "sins", but there is an unexpected emphasis here on freeing people from obligations, rather than on the simple forgiveness of wrongs.
I suspect that this can be better understood by comparing the Lord's Prayer with the dedication prayer said by King Solomon at the consecration of the Temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 8.15-61, 2 Chronicles 6.14-42). This is a far longer text, but the essence covers the same topics: it proclaims the majesty of the God of Heaven, and establishes the Temple as a place of justice for those accused of trespass against their neighbours, and as a place of redemption for the people's sins, which might otherwise lead them into hunger and captivity.
So, the Lord's Prayer looks back to the Old Testament - but there is also an important change in emphasis. By accepting this prayer from Jesus, we implicitly proclaim his identity as the Christ, the successor of David and Solomon - renewing the relationship between God and man that was embodied in the Temple in Jerusalem.
But the Lord's Prayer is not simply about renewal - it is also about transformation. While Solomon spoke his prayer alone, we are in a sense praying alongside Jesus, here. "Our Father", in these words, is both the heavenly Father of the divine Son, and the universal Father of all.
As such, as a prayer to be said regularly by everyone, the Lord's Prayer reflects an important change, the move from the Temple and its ritual obligations and law codes, to the community of believers, the new teaching of Jesus, and forgiveness through love and grace.
In this sense, indeed, the conceptual joining of the forgiveness of sins and the freedom from ritual obligations becomes very central indeed.
In this short, simple prayer, there is, in short, an expression of all the basic precepts of Christianity. It is close to the basis of the heritage shared by all Christians, in ways far beyond the simple fact of its early position in our canon.
Our Father who art in heaven,This short and simple prayer is perhaps the most basic and ancient text of Christianity, shared universally among almost every congregation. It is known from its first line as the Our Father or Pater Noster, and also as the Lord's Prayer, reflecting that it is identified in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and in the liturgy of the Church, as being taught by Jesus Himself.
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.(For thine is the kingdom,
(and the power, and the glory,
)for ever and ever.)
Amen.
It begins as an address to God that proclaims the holiness and authority of the Creator, and then becomes a prayer for "us", paired with a reminder to be kind and generous to others. In so doing, it serves to express the two Great Commandments - to love and honour God, and to our neighbours as ourselves (Mark 12.18-34, Matt. 22.34-40). In its simplicity, it seems straightforward and economical.
Yet if you look closely, there is a depth of complexity in this short, familiar prayer. The most obvious question is why there's a section I've printed in brackets - this is a type of prayer coda, known as the doxology (Gk. doxologos, "statement of glory"). It represents a very early textual variant in the text of Matthew, but it leads into wider topics about the development of the New Testament, which I want to discuss more in a later sketch - so for now, it's simply enough to note that the Lord's Prayer was used in diverse ways from a very early date: some Christians integrated the concluding doxology, while others didn't use it at all.
There are also two very hard-to-translate words in the underlying Greek text: firstly, the word usually rendered as "daily", which in Greek is epiousion, a very unusual word that means literally "more than immediate"; it is not wrong to understand this as "daily", but there is something more here, a mysteriousness that is sensed but not fully explained - something that is captured in the technical Latin translation, supersubstantialem. This is a word that reminds us that God's presence in reality is more than we can understand or define, and anticipates the mysterious reality of Christ's presence in the bread of the Sacrament.
The second unusual choice of words is the references to "trespasses", which would be more accurately translated "debts" or "legal obligations". Luke, but not Matthew or the liturgical version, has a different word for our own "trespasses", meaning more explicitly "faults" or "sins", but there is an unexpected emphasis here on freeing people from obligations, rather than on the simple forgiveness of wrongs.
I suspect that this can be better understood by comparing the Lord's Prayer with the dedication prayer said by King Solomon at the consecration of the Temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 8.15-61, 2 Chronicles 6.14-42). This is a far longer text, but the essence covers the same topics: it proclaims the majesty of the God of Heaven, and establishes the Temple as a place of justice for those accused of trespass against their neighbours, and as a place of redemption for the people's sins, which might otherwise lead them into hunger and captivity.
So, the Lord's Prayer looks back to the Old Testament - but there is also an important change in emphasis. By accepting this prayer from Jesus, we implicitly proclaim his identity as the Christ, the successor of David and Solomon - renewing the relationship between God and man that was embodied in the Temple in Jerusalem.
But the Lord's Prayer is not simply about renewal - it is also about transformation. While Solomon spoke his prayer alone, we are in a sense praying alongside Jesus, here. "Our Father", in these words, is both the heavenly Father of the divine Son, and the universal Father of all.
As such, as a prayer to be said regularly by everyone, the Lord's Prayer reflects an important change, the move from the Temple and its ritual obligations and law codes, to the community of believers, the new teaching of Jesus, and forgiveness through love and grace.
In this sense, indeed, the conceptual joining of the forgiveness of sins and the freedom from ritual obligations becomes very central indeed.
In this short, simple prayer, there is, in short, an expression of all the basic precepts of Christianity. It is close to the basis of the heritage shared by all Christians, in ways far beyond the simple fact of its early position in our canon.
Edinburgh Art Festival - Dean Gallery
Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists
(Dean Gallery, until 9th January 2011)
Stand-up comedians say that Edinburgh is the month that comes between July and September. The reason for this is the Festival, the sprawling splurge of art, theatre, culture and bad jokes that takes over the capital for a month.
Not all of the Fesitval is in August--the Film Festival now takes place in June; and now, the major art exhibitions are opening in mid-July.
The first hint of this year's offering was a new work by Anthony Gormley (creator of the Angel of the North)--in the form of a life-sized bronze statue of a man, rising chest-high out of the pavement tarmac near the Modern Art Gallery. This is one of a series of life-size figures along the Water of Leith, the river that braids its way through the city's suburbs. They're wonderfully beautiful and effective, their archaic simplicity and earthy patina fitting neatly within their new surroundings - the light-patterned leafscapes and bowed branches overhanging the river, the reflective ripples of the stream, and the asphalt and ironwork of the paths and pavements from which they're viewed.
The main event, however, is a seminal exhibition of surrealist art at the Dean Gallery. Edinburgh has one of the world's greatest surrealist collections, thanks in large part to the generosity of Gabrielle Keiler--collector, benefactor and marmalade heiress--and this exhibition is able to present a thorough retrospective of the twentieth century's most important artistic movement. This is very much an Edinburgh exhibition--it's a measure of the stature of the Dean collection that they've been able to loan a number of pieces from London to complete the picture.
This is nothing less than a complete overview of the surrealist movement, from Dada to World War 2. We have Duchamp's fountain - or rather, one of the handful of autographed replicas that he created to replace the lost original, cheekily arranged on its back in a glass box, like a museum specimin - and, of course, Magritte's Ce nest pas un pipe.
The dance of Man Ray and Lee Miller--sexual and stylistic--teases us throughout the gallery, while the key surrealist themes of fornication, mechanization, humour and unconscious knowledge are all laid out for the casual visitor. Of course, that's not to underestimate the straightforward pulling power of big names: the exhibition boasts a large number of works by Dali and Miró, plus a mix of old favourites and unexpected surprises from Giorgio de Chirico, and a very wide selection by Max Ernst--I find his paintings a little emotionally stiff, but they're meant to be that way, communication a Germanic tension from the edge of the Nazi rise--and a wall paneled with his woodcuts is electrifying, all the more powerful for being so unexpected, so new.
The perfectly counterpoints the Dean Gallery's permanent displays of work by Edouardo Paolozzi, Edinburgh's own heir to the surrealist mantle; and while you're there, look up at the dome in the stairwell, to see an excellent, veriginous site-specific piece by Richard Wright.
This isn't just worth a visit--it's essential.
(Dean Gallery, until 9th January 2011)
Stand-up comedians say that Edinburgh is the month that comes between July and September. The reason for this is the Festival, the sprawling splurge of art, theatre, culture and bad jokes that takes over the capital for a month.
Not all of the Fesitval is in August--the Film Festival now takes place in June; and now, the major art exhibitions are opening in mid-July.
The first hint of this year's offering was a new work by Anthony Gormley (creator of the Angel of the North)--in the form of a life-sized bronze statue of a man, rising chest-high out of the pavement tarmac near the Modern Art Gallery. This is one of a series of life-size figures along the Water of Leith, the river that braids its way through the city's suburbs. They're wonderfully beautiful and effective, their archaic simplicity and earthy patina fitting neatly within their new surroundings - the light-patterned leafscapes and bowed branches overhanging the river, the reflective ripples of the stream, and the asphalt and ironwork of the paths and pavements from which they're viewed.
The main event, however, is a seminal exhibition of surrealist art at the Dean Gallery. Edinburgh has one of the world's greatest surrealist collections, thanks in large part to the generosity of Gabrielle Keiler--collector, benefactor and marmalade heiress--and this exhibition is able to present a thorough retrospective of the twentieth century's most important artistic movement. This is very much an Edinburgh exhibition--it's a measure of the stature of the Dean collection that they've been able to loan a number of pieces from London to complete the picture.
This is nothing less than a complete overview of the surrealist movement, from Dada to World War 2. We have Duchamp's fountain - or rather, one of the handful of autographed replicas that he created to replace the lost original, cheekily arranged on its back in a glass box, like a museum specimin - and, of course, Magritte's Ce nest pas un pipe.
The dance of Man Ray and Lee Miller--sexual and stylistic--teases us throughout the gallery, while the key surrealist themes of fornication, mechanization, humour and unconscious knowledge are all laid out for the casual visitor. Of course, that's not to underestimate the straightforward pulling power of big names: the exhibition boasts a large number of works by Dali and Miró, plus a mix of old favourites and unexpected surprises from Giorgio de Chirico, and a very wide selection by Max Ernst--I find his paintings a little emotionally stiff, but they're meant to be that way, communication a Germanic tension from the edge of the Nazi rise--and a wall paneled with his woodcuts is electrifying, all the more powerful for being so unexpected, so new.
The perfectly counterpoints the Dean Gallery's permanent displays of work by Edouardo Paolozzi, Edinburgh's own heir to the surrealist mantle; and while you're there, look up at the dome in the stairwell, to see an excellent, veriginous site-specific piece by Richard Wright.
This isn't just worth a visit--it's essential.
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