I love the family I’ve built for the Kamenskys. I love the way they come together in the wake of the devastation of their home and their oldest son’s death; I love their rigorous fair dealing with the dragons in the lull of the war. That story will always be important to me, and one I hold on to. But I don’t truly understand the layered generational traumas that Madame Kamensky would’ve lived. The way violence in the Pale of Settlement always touched Jewish communities first; the ways that Jewish people were programmatically made vulnerable to state violence. How experiencing the loss of her home during the war would have touched on all of the losses she’d experienced throughout her life, and how rebuilding as a community would have touched on the legacy of shared joys and survival that she was heir to.

I try to write about people whose lives are outside of my own realm of experience. I think that’s important for all writers to do. But on some things, I cannot claim authority, because to do so would disrespect the authority of others. There are so many Jewish writers who could write the story in my head with the authority and experience it deserves.

So unfortunately, I will not be posting “The Rest of the Kamenskys Are Okay.” But I want you to know that they are okay. And if anyone wants to tell the story where they’re okay, I encourage it.

When I was a kid, my younger sisters wanted to read the books that I read, and (because at that time in my life I was completely insufferable) I told them that they wouldn’t understand because my books had a lot of “big words.”

“Like what?” my middle sister challenged me (because even as a kid, she knew her worth).

I cast desperately about for an example. “Like ‘mar,'” I said. “And ‘cur.'” Unsurprisingly, these three-letter words failed to impress.

Now that I’m older, I’ve realized two things: first, you should never tell a kid what she can’t read. Second, what we call “big words” are often actually esoteric words. They’re words that we are unlikely to have encountered in our daily lives, words that we might have to puzzle out or that might have a context-specific meaning.

Esotericism

The most important thing to remember is, no two people are going to have the same bank of words they know — not even if they were raised in the same house, went to the same school, and read the same books. Chance encounters with new vocabulary happen every day; I most recently learned new words from a video game (aphotic), a scientific article (neutropenia), and a piece of erotica (petrichor). Every job I’ve ever done has its own specialized vocabulary, whether it’s the language of rhetoric or the names of a photographer’s tools or the medical terminology used in clinical research. The further you step outside of your home language community, the more likely you are to encounter new words.

Therefore, and I cannot stress this enough: words are not esoteric by nature; words are esoteric relative to the reader.

The effect of encountering an esoteric word is often a pause, followed by a little work on the reader’s part. Some readers may hesitate, then skim past an unfamiliar word, expecting that context will help to fill in the gap if it’s important. Others will take out a phone or a dictionary and look the word up. Some will sit for a moment, rereading the word, trying to figure out what it means based on other words they know. In all three cases, the esoteric word requires effort to parse, and for me, it’s important to make that work easier and to repay the reader’s effort.

There are several reasons why you might want to use an esoteric word. Perhaps it’s a term for something specific that you want to include as a detail; perhaps you enjoy the way it sounds. In the example below, we’ll use one of my favorite sets of esoteric words — the names of minerals — to show how you can make the work easier and more rewarding for readers.

They were surrounded by crystals, some almost clear, others deep red or flame-golden.

Versus

They were surrounded by calcite and carbuncle and carnelian.

Versus

They were surrounded by crystals, clear spears of calcite and deep red carbuncle and carnelian in flame-golden shards.

In these examples, we veer between two extremes: in the first, the words are not particularly esoteric, but they feel vague and nonspecific, which cuts down on their richness. In the second example, the author just plunks down the esoteric words for types of minerals without providing any kind of context — not even what general category they fall into — to help the reader understand them. They sound very pretty with their hard “c” initial sounds, but their meaning is unclear.

In the third example, though, the author uses the esoteric words as an appositive (a word or phrase that renames something else in the sentence) for “crystals,” so it’s clear to the reader that all three unfamiliar words are examples of crystals. Moreover, by listing the rocks with their associated colors, the author teaches the reader something about each rock.

There are other circumstances where you would want to use esoteric words, such as when you want to show a character’s expertise. In these cases, the basic principle of appositives can help readers make sense of the esoteric words. If you have a character who’s using a stream of esoteric words (whether it’s “technobabble” or realistic field-specific jargon), it can be helpful to have someone rephrase the gist of those esoteric words into more everyday words. This can be an excellent opportunity for characterization, too. Some of the best science communicators know how to slip between verbal registers and levels of complexity in order to make their work accessible to non-experts; some of the worst so-called “experts” retreat hissing behind a wall of jargon when anyone has the temerity to suggest that they might not actually know what they’re talking about.

A final case where you might want to use esoteric words is to draw attention to a key concept (either a plot point or a kind of leitmotif or repeating musical theme). Tolkien did this a lot with his constructed languages; he did not expect readers to come into Lord of the Rings knowing what a mallorn or a Balrog was, or whether you ate lembas or fought it off with a stick. But these things were special in his world, infused with power and meaning, and so he chose to construct names for them instead of letting them be Tree and Monster and Bread.

That doesn’t mean you have to be Tolkien, and frankly many people would rather you not. But sometimes, your story revolves around the Atlas Stone or the Singing Hands; sometimes it’s key to a character’s presentation that she always wears a widow’s black bombazine or that he’s dressed to the nines in an embroidered sherwani. Each time that esoteric term arises, you have an opportunity to add a new detail: the cloudy blue surface of the stone, the elegance of her hands as they weave a spell or a story, the rustle of bombazine fabric or how the cut of the sherwani flatters his trim waist. These details will accumulate over time, arising in the reader’s memory like ghosts each time the unfamiliar term appears.

But remember: you’re never going to be able to account for every reader’s mental storehouse of words, and you shouldn’t have to. Not a single one of these tools would’ve helped eight-year-old me figure out “mar” or “cur,” because the author could not have anticipated that she would introduce me to them.

Your readers have more access to dictionaries than ever before, and sometimes, it’s okay to make people use them.

Our first, most basic tool will always be words. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a thrill to learning new words that’s rivaled only by finding cool rocks or picking flowers. When I see “susurrus” or “inchoate” or “lumpen” on the page, I just want to reach into the story and put it in my pocket.

For me, deciding which words to use is a matter of specificity, esotericism, etymology, and sonics. These are all important things to consider, so I’ll be making a separate post for each.

Specificity

When I talk about the specificity of a word, I’m really talking about how much detail is already captured in the word choice. A general word gestures to a broad category of things, their differences and particularities blurred; a specific word emphasizes those particularities.

Specificity is the camera focus of word choice. When you choose a specific word, you paint a clearer and sharper picture of that thing, which can be used to place emphasis within a passage of text. Compare:

They danced beneath the quaking aspens, sunlight shining amber-golden through the yellow leaves.

Versus

The merrymakers danced under the sunlit trees, Miss Topha decked in emerald ribbons and Old Ned waving his hickory cane and sticky children everywhere underfoot.

The beginning of each sentence uses specificity to set up what the end of each sentence delivers. In the first sentence, who “they” is doesn’t particularly matter; the author is focusing on the autumnal environment. This can work well to “pull the camera back” from the characters, which can help transition out of a character-focused scene. In the second sentence, though, the trees are almost irrelevant except in passing, as a setting — the author is drawing the reader’s attention to who is dancing, and why they are dancing, and how they are interacting with each other.

As the examples above show, specificity isn’t just a matter of combing the thesaurus for the right synonym. The more details you add, the more senses you engage, the more “focus” you will place on an object, character, or idea.

This can be why some people get turned off by “purple prose” or ruminating epic fantasy — it can be hard sometimes to know what to focus on, when everything is lavishly detailed. Sometimes, you can use this reaction to your advantage, such as when you want your reader to feel overwhelmed and grasping for anchor points. In those cases, the contrast of following overwhelming detail with something stated clearly and simply can act almost like negative space in visual art:

All around her were embroidered silken fans, veils dripping with beads of emerald and garnet, damask gowns in viridian and claret and ebony. The room stank of perfumes: attar of rose and woodruff and ambergris and clove, orange peel mingling with fierce civet musk until the whole room reeked like a weasel orgy in a spice market. Sweat gathered under her mask and dripped in rivulets to her bare clavicles. Elise fanned ferociously at her neck, but still her pulse pounded as though someone was beating a tarantella on a taut skin drum.

Then Isabella called out “Elise!” from across the crowded room, and all at once Elise’s anxieties melted away.

In the passage above, Elise is experiencing sensory overload and alienation (notice that what she pays attention to are not the people in the room, but what they are wearing and what they smell like). She feels hot and anxious and out of place, and the parade of details serves to create the same effect of overwhelm for the reader. But when Isabella calls for her, suddenly there is another human being in the room with her, and the simplicity of her shout is enough to break through both the prose and Elise’s anxiety.

If you’re struggling with a passage of your writing, try varying the specificity — maybe you’re getting hung up on detailing something that isn’t actually all that important, or maybe you’d benefit from shifting the focus. Just changing a sentence’s detail level to emphasize a different character, object, or setting can be really helpful in providing you with a jumping-off point for the next sentence.

Happy writing!

There’s much to recommend this book that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Autonomous, which is for the most part set in midwestern Canada, is the first SF book I’ve ever seen that really tackles the experience of living in and traveling through rural, agricultural spaces and small-to-midsize towns. From the epigraphical lyrics of “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate” to the image of rolling canola fields, there’s a familiarity and intimacy to these landscapes that makes their importance self-evident. (And let’s not forget how closely the agricultural industry is tied to biochemical companies, with their seed patents and their attempt to enforce intellectual property restrictions on the natural cross-pollination of cultivars). As a person who grew up among farmers, hauling hay bales and listening to my father gossip at the seed and feed store, the moments when Newitz dwelt on the farmlands felt both authentic and emotionally charged for me. The prairie landscape of Saskatchewan was not incidental but rather vital to the story that Newitz was telling.

The portrayal of AIs was also gorgeous and nuanced and solidly built. I loved the social protocols for data exchange and greeting and authentication; they felt like the kinds of scripts that humans are even now writing for AIs to make them seem approachable. I also loved how robots do drugs and how they get off — the images of programs glitching, data fragmenting, bad variables making processes slow and hazy and hallucinatory. The cyborg element of the robot build was also a fascinating twist, and the human cast’s human-centric responses to it were believable and ably executed. Newitz’s technical background is on full display here, creating plausible systems of programs that together form people; I’m genuinely excited to see what this author has to offer next.

But there’s also the story itself, which I’ve hidden beneath the jump in case anyone is still worried about spoilers.

This is a book of two parallel stories. The first is pirate Jack Chen’s quest to take down a pharmaceutical company when a drug formula she steals has terrible side effects. The second is the mission to stop Jack at any cost, which pairs the robot Paladin with a human handler. Braiding these two stories together are complicated questions about legal personhood, intellectual property, and the titular autonomy.

Bluntly, this is a book about slavery, and about how easily it can emerge (de facto and/or de jure) out of capitalism.

Jack Chen is enfranchised — a citizen and a legal person — whose personhood was set up for her by her family. Other human characters aren’t so lucky. In Newitz’s future, as a result of the development of AI who had to earn their independent personhood through labor, many humans have also entered indenture contracts (or were born into them). Indeed, to hear the narrator tell it, humans demanded the opportunity to sell away their personhood. As one might imagine, indenture contracts were almost always lopsided in favor of the contract holder, and contracts could be sold in bulk like any other business asset. As one might imagine, contract holders practice other forms of abuse and dehumanization, in addition to mere ownership of people’s labor.

Paladin, on the other hand, is not autonomous. There are thoughts that Paladin is not capable of thinking, questions that Paladin is not capable of asking, due to programming intended to keep Paladin subservient. Autonomy is a reward that Paladin can earn, if she can survive the work that she “owes” to the company that crafted her. (Most robots on the same track don’t survive that long.)

In a world where the nation-state has largely been subsumed by corporations, consortiums, and NGOs, the logic of capitalism reigns supreme — and piracy is both a way to survive it and a rallying cry against it. Jack finds her hope in loose associations of individual scientists, driven by curiosity or goodwill or a desire to beat the system; Paladin navigates the gaps in her experience by making connections with other robots. Both these groups have a kind of energy to them that feels at once focused and anarchic, like the movements of birds gathering to form a sky-filling flock. (It gave me flashbacks to grad-school days reading Hardt and Negri’s Multitude.)

Community achieves small, reasonable goals. One drug pulled. One AI granted autonomy. One pirate who sails off into the distance to make new trouble. But that larger scaffolding of depersonalizing capitalism remains, and its logic swallows up those little victories with comfortable ease. And that’s what upsets me, even now — I came out of this book DESPERATE to tear it all down. To shake the foundations of gluttonous capital until they cracked and broke; to insist on the dignity of people in both their emergent communities and their fragile, vital individuality.

This book does not offer the tools for tearing down that system. But in its terrifyingly believable sketch of a possible future, it reminds us that we have a charge: act now to create a better one.

Pirate it, if we have to.

I’ve always loved writing poetry, and that love still strongly informs my prose style. There’s nothing more exciting than figuring out how to make words fit together–the firm conviction of a metered line. The way a run of consonants can make a passage murmur like a brook or whine like cicadas in high summer. The hollow finality of rounded vowels.

(And of course, much of what the Western canon teaches us about poetry comes from the very inland seas that inspired this anthology.)

Please do check out this anthology if you’re interested in myths imagined and stars unnumbered.

A writer whose work I admire once said — I’m paraphrasing here — that in almost every case, replacing semicolons with full stops will make for better writing. In this particular case, I know that the writer who said it was making an offhand comment, not trying to lay down her fundamental philosophy of writing. As a former English teacher, I also know that semicolons have a handful of legitimate uses and can actually improve a piece of writing when used effectively.  As a former scholar of the eighteenth century, I know that this prescription is of relatively recent vintage. In short, I know that this is not one of the Immutable Laws of Writing Handed Down from On High.

But all the same, that comment has stuck in my mind, and every time I sit down to write, I hear it. When I try to string sentences together, I remind myself that I am No Longer Allowed to use semicolons (or em-dashes, that other breathless punctuation mark of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). After a taxing hour of stops and starts, I reread my handful of sentences, and they sound hideous to my ears. The pacing is wrong. Too choppy. No ebbs and flows, no crescendos and decrescendos, no gentle gliding from one idea to the next. If there’s a trick to writing lyrical sentences without semicolons, I never learned it.

I surface from my word processor, heartsick and practically vibrating with self-loathing. A quiet part of me asks, Didn’t I used to be good at writing?

I think many writers have had a similar experience. We want to write well, by which we mean that we want to write the kind of shining, supple prose that reshapes the world in its own image. But that particular talent is cultivated only through observation and practice, and there are only so many times and so many ways that a writer can say, “Observe! Practice!” Thus, in lieu of teaching people to write well, most practical writing advice instead aims more humbly at teaching them to write correctly.

While writing correctly is always at least partly a matter of taste, there are usually enough commonalities within an era or a genre that it’s possible to cobble together a set of rules. Semicolons are my current bugbear, but I’ve encountered writerly Thou Shalt Nots on dozens of other topics: epithets (“the blonde girl”), dialogue tags (“said”), contractions, adverbs, parentheses, sentence fragments, showing versus telling, point-of-view shifts. There are always celebrated rulebreakers — Terry Pratchett, for example, is a master at telling rather than showing — but I’ve come across vanishingly few guides that lay out rules in order to explain how they might productively be broken.

At the beginning of a new project, I’m particularly susceptible to the allure of a set of rules. When you’re desperate to write well, but you aren’t sure what “writing well” entails, it’s natural to seek out guidance from people whose prose routinely shatters you. And it’s also natural to want to implement that guidance as you draft.

For me, though, that approach is almost universally fatal. Nothing kills my projects quite so thoroughly as coming to them with judgment in my heart, scrutinizing every sentence for flaws before I’ve written it. When I’m that concerned with being correct, I forget to observe my characters with emotional honesty, and I’m left with a story that feels like it’s made of cardboard. Apart from anything else, that obsessive self-policing is really exhausting.

As Anne Lamott reminds us in Bird by Bird, it can be liberating to write a really terrible first draft. At their best, first drafts offer an opportunity for exploration and discovery, even for scrupulous outliners like me. They let me stumble across energizing subplots and powerful themes, explore the recesses of the characters’ psyches, and learn what’s really at stake at the story’s climax. Some of my finest turns of phrase have come to me during a first draft, the natural outgrowth of a scene in full flow.

The rest of my best lines, though, have emerged from revision. Once the story is complete, I have the leisure to toil over a sentence as long as I like, deciding whether a bell “rang” or “tolled” or “sounded.” I can decide how much information the readers really need about the particular shade of the sunset as the last evening light spills over the hills. I can slice out three hundred semicolons and two hundred em-dashes in a single, brutal day (or, if I’m feeling contrarian, leave them all where they are).

There’s value in having conversations about whether semicolons are dead, whether showing is always better than telling, or whether it’s ever acceptable to loosen up a tight third-person perspective–but the time to have those arguments is after the first draft.

During the first draft, it’s time to write.

“What do you say to that, Tarasov? The dragons have a language—they even write poetry, whether or not it’s any good.”

“Are you sure it isn’t a hoax? A kind of … scholarly prank, devised by bored young men who know too much Greek and too little of the world?”

In these inspiration posts, I want to talk about events from history or cultural artifacts that inspired a few lines of Drakon. Hardly any spoilers here; only a little background.

Only a few days before I started writing Drakon, one of my professors introduced me to the greatest literary hoax of the eighteenth century: James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language. These fragments were the precursor to Macpherson’s much better-known anthology The Works of Ossian, which was what got him into real trouble.

As Macpherson told it, he happened to acquire some verses of ancient Gaelic¹ poetry in the Highlands. Although these poems occasioned some polite interest, very few Scottish people understood the language well enough to comprehend them, and even fewer of a literary bent knew enough to attempt a translation. Macpherson, though, had been waiting for a chance to try his own hand. The “spirit and force” of these works kindled a poetic fire in him, and he dashed off a translation and shared it with a few Scottish literary contacts. Soon, all of Edinburgh was abuzz with the news: the poetry of their ancestors still lived. There was a man who could tell them the stories they’d forgotten.

Their astonishment and adulation convinced Macpherson that his translations would find a market. Buoyed by the promise of an eager reading public, he worked tirelessly to track down other fragments that had withstood the centuries and to render them in English. At last, Macpherson compiled his first volume of translations: Fragments of Ancient Poetry. He would later refine it into The Works of Ossian, named for the blind bard who had originally recounted the tales.

This is a familiar story to anyone who is familiar with the antiquarians, anthropologists, and archivists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Macpherson’s project was ostensibly the same as that of many other collectors, including the celebrated Brothers Grimm, Francis James Child, and Elias Lönnrot (many of whom he inspired). He went among the people of the countryside, learning stories and songs so old that time had veiled their origins, and he returned to the city full of tales and mysteries. The intellectual luminaries of Scotland praised him to the skies for teaching them to say what they’d been trying for centuries to articulate: We are a people, because we have a story.

The only problem was, Macpherson was making it all up.

Even in his own day, skeptics called his story into question. Even Macpherson’s most ardent supporters wanted to see the ancient manuscripts; his detractors outright implied that they’d never existed. Macpherson clearly felt the pinch. His 1760 Fragments of Ancient Poetry began with a rather formulaic preface that situated these “genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry” in “an aera of the most remote antiquity.” In 1761-2, though, when he published Fingal, he included a defensive advertisement claiming,

Some men of genius, whom he has the honour to number among his friends, advised him to publish proposals for printing by subscription the whole Originals, as a better way of satisfying the public concerning the authenticity of the poems, than depositing manuscript copies in any public library. This he did; but no subscribers appearing, he takes it for the judgment of the public that neither the one or the other is necessary.

(These “men of genius,” of course, hadn’t seen his “Originals,” either.) By the time Macpherson got around to publishing The Works of Ossian in 1765, he’d received enough hatemail that he started arming himself with “A Dissertation Concerning the Antiquity &c. of the Poems” and a dedication that implied the approbation of Lord Bute. For all the uncertainty surrounding its authenticity, the book was wildly popular, with multiple editions released within the span of a year.

One of Macpherson’s greatest doubters was Samuel Johnson, best known today for his dictionary.² Johnson’s remarks on Ossian were often scathing; at his most charitable, Johnson wrote,

I believe [the poems of Ossian] never existed in any other form than that which we have seen. [Macpherson] has doubtless inserted names that circulate in popular stories, and may have translated some wandering ballads, if any can be found; and the names, and some of the images being recollected, make an inaccurate auditor imagine, by the help of Caledonian bigotry, that he has formerly heard the whole.

Outraged at the unceasing criticism and the demands for the originals, Macpherson wrote to Johnson demanding retractions. If he didn’t outright challenge Johnson to a duel, the language of his letters came close enough to a formal challenge that Johnson clearly felt the threat. His own writing suggests that he was more than willing to throw down, if it came to blows.

With Johnson and his fellow skeptics keeping the authenticity dispute in the public eye, Macpherson was forced to remain on the defensive. He tried to salvage his good name, eventually producing “the Originals” — or at least, poems in Scottish Gaelic — for inspection. The ruse eventually fell through when readers actually familiar with the language denounced them as ill-made back-translations of the English verses.

At the time of Macpherson’s death, many still believed in the authenticity of his Ossian. Macpherson had himself enshrined in Westminster Abbey, among the storied dead of England.

With the benefit of historical hindsight, it would be easy to dismiss Macpherson as a man striving after celebrity. But what makes his story interesting to me isn’t just the hoax or the controversy that followed; it’s also why so many people believed in Ossian the bard.

There’s the obvious answer: Scottish nationalism. I empathize with that powerful longing for a story that binds a people together — when I first read the Kalevala in translation, it felt like coming home, although I’ve never been to Finland and don’t speak enough Finnish to hold a conversation. The Kalevala was the story of my grandmother, though, and the story of her people before her, and it linked me to them like a shining silver thread.

But as Tolkien wrote of the Kalevala, the language also offers a thrill of the unfamiliar that one often mistakes for the ancient:³

 The almost indefinable sense of newness and strangeness … will either perturb you or delight you … trees will group differently on the horizon, the birds will make unfamiliar music; the inhabitants will talk a wild and at first unintelligible lingo. … This is how it was for me when I first read the Kalevala — that is, crossed the gulf between the Indo-European-speaking peoples of Europe into this smaller realm of those who cling in queer corners to the forgotten tongues and memories of an elder day.

For me, the versification of the Fragments is a big part of why so many believed, despite Macpherson’s almost comical refusal to produce the original verses. Initially, he claimed to have been reluctant to publish because the works of the ancients “would be very ill relished by the public as so very different from the strain of modern ideas, and of modern, connected, and polished poetry.” Even now, these fragments read something like a fever-dream:

I sit by the mossy fountain; on the 

top of the hill of winds. One tree is 

rustling above me. Dark waves roll 

over the heath. The lake is troubled 

below. The deer descend from the 

hill. No hunter at a distance is seen; 

no whistling cow-herd is nigh. It is 

mid-day: but all is silent. 

Compare this verse to a more typical work published in 1763 (George Keate’s The Alps, also about a landscape):

In this wild Scene of Nature’s true Sublime

What Prospects rise! Rocks above Rocks appear,

Mix with th’ incumbent Clouds, and laugh to scorn

All the proud Boasts of Art. In purest Snow

Some mantled, others their enormous Backs

Heave high with Forests crown’d; nor midst the View

Are wanting those who their insulting Heads

Uprear, barren and bleak, as in Contempt

Of vegetative Laws.

The simplicity of Macpherson’s language (like a literal translation, little embellished) and the clarity of his images stand out against the rigid iambic pentameter and soaring abstractions of Keate. This was before the rise of Wordsworth and poetry as imitating natural language; but for a few outliers like the rapturous Christopher “Kit” Smart, almost no one was writing poetry that sounded like Macpherson’s work. We may acknowledge the justice of Johnson’s quip that “many men, many women, and many children” in the modern era could have written such poetry, but the fact remained that many didn’t. For readers raised on the stately Classicist verse of the early eighteenth century, the novelty must have been thrilling. Here is the work of a mind alien to the Greeks and the Romans, some must have thought. Here is a poetry that makes trees group differently on the horizon, and birds sing unfamiliar songs.

When I was writing about the poetry of the dragons, this is what I wanted to convey: the sense of having stumbled upon something that felt at once ancient and viscerally new. Something that convinced one of its authenticity not through logic or evidence, but because it reframed the world like a lightning strike.

If you want to read more about the Ossian controversy, Thomas M. Curley has written a very pro-Johnson article that has some excellent primary source quotations. You should also read Ian Haywood’s book The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction.

^{1. Today, “Gaelic” is often used promiscuously to refer to any language in the Gaelic/Goidelic language family (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx). Eighteenth-century British writers had similar issues with nomenclature; they often used “Erse” (Irish) to refer to the Scottish Gaelic vernacular of the Highlands.}

^{2. Samuel Johnson’s own forays into poetic and dramatic literature, such as his play Irene: A Tragedy, have for the most part been forgotten. I don’t care for them much on their literary merits, but I respect their historical significance.}

^{3. The Kalevala is a significant departure from the runot sung by the women of Karjala (Karelia). Although Elias Lönnrot did record parts of these poems faithfully, he reorganized them into his own heroic teleology and rewrote parts of them entirely to suit his narrative needs. While Lönnrot’s Kalevala  would indeed have been full of “memories of an elder day” to Tolkien, who was writing around a hundred years later, it is by no means an untouched record of the ancient songs of the Finnish east. Juha Pentikäinen has done some fascinating research on this topic, and his works are well worth a look.}

So it goes–but from the husk of the old, I’ll yet shake out some new seeds and see what grows when I plant them. My garden’s already well on the way.