It's all relative (part 1)

This is the last of the background posts I had planned (for the time being anyway). In the others, I have written about cognitive philology, interdisciplinarity, and interconnectivity. Here I wish to briefly state my position on linguistic relativity. I’ve touched on the topic before in a number of other posts, and it was the focus of a conference paper I mentioned, but I thought it was worth briefly summarising in one post what exactly linguistic relativity means (to me in any case), and what position I take on this often controversial topic. I’ll break it into two posts to keep it from being too long, so expect the second part to follow shortly. I’ve briefly explained linguistic relativity before, but here in more detail is the summary I originally wrote (in slightly modified form) for a conference paper, with special focus on some recent research on the topic by Lera Boroditsky.

The idea of a relationship between language and thought was touched on to some extent by such early 20th century anthropologists as Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, but is was really due to the systematic treatment by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir, that it became a focus of attention. Though Sapir himself never directly argued for a strong causal link between language and thought, Whorf’s bold claims about such a connection have led to the idea being often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Simply put, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that differences in linguistic features (and that could be anything from words to the kinds of grammatical information expressed in a language, like verb tense, to syntactical structures used) from one language to the next determine or at least influence the ways in which speakers of those languages think about the world. For instance, Whorf made the observation (largely incorrectly as it turns out) that “the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time,’ or to past, present, or future” (57) and thus he concluded that it was “gratuitous to assume that Hopi thinking contains any such notion as the supposed intuitively felt flowing of ‘time’” (58).1 There have come to be two versions of this hypothesis, the strong and weak versions, sometimes distinguished as linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. The strong determinism version maintains that the particular linguistic categories available to a speaker determine and constrain what the speaker is able to think, whereas the weak relativity version states only that language differences can lead to differences in thought. While few scholars still hold to the strong formulation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the weak version has remained an open question.

For much of the latter half of the 20th century, this notion fell out of favour and has been strongly rejected, especially after Noam Chomsky first proposed the notion of a universal grammar, which has since become the mainstream position. Chomsky specifically rejected Whorf’s idea of linguistic determinism, and instead held that language differences were surface-level only, and that all humans shared a common grammar driven by a common faculty of language acquisition. More recently, Steven Pinker states unequivocally that the theory is “wrong, all wrong”, and instead argues for an underlying language common to all people, which he calls ‘mentalese’, and further proposes that humans possess an innate instinct for language which has evolved through natural selection.2 Indeed the mainstream view for the past half century has been to search for universals in human language, and to assume that human cognition too is universal regardless of linguistic differences. As Whorf’s linguistic observations had fallen through, and in the absence of much real evidence in support of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the notion of linguistic relativity remained either a fringe view or one of mistaken popular conception only.

However, in more recent years, perhaps only the past decade or a little more, many of these mainstream notions in linguistics have been challenged. For one thing, linguists are more and more starting to challenge the idea of a universal grammar,3 especially in the light of cognitive linguistics which seeks to explain linguistic phenomena on the basis of general cognitive principles rather than specialised language mechanisms. Furthermore, new experimental evidence in support of linguistic relativity is being generated by a number of cognitive scientists, most notably Lera Boroditsky, along with her various collaborators and other researchers working along similar lines.

Boroditsky’s research is based mainly on experimental procedures, often involving cross-linguistic evidence, generated by conducting controlled lab experiments on native speakers and measured by very quantitative results such as response times. She has conducted research on such phenomena as colour perception, demonstrating that possessing particular colour categories in one’s language improves one’s performance in non-linguistic colour discrimination tasks. Thus Russian speakers can more quickly distinguish between two distinct and mutually exclusive shades of blue, goluboy ‘light blue’ and siniy ‘dark blue’, than English speakers, who collapse all such shades under the one umbrella term blue. Boroditsky has also shown the effect of agentive language on eye-witness memory, with speakers of languages that grammatically require an agent even for accidental events having better memory of the agent involved in an action which they have witnessed; this is the case with English, which uses more agentive language, as opposed to Japanese or Spanish, which use less agentive language, for instance. The quantity of agentive language also correlates with the assignment of blame and even harshness of penalties, both in laboratory experimentation and in analysis of court transcripts. Boroditsky has also demonstrated that grammatical gender has an impact on how we think about objects, assigning gendered qualities to them and influencing how abstract concepts are allegorised in art, a result that will be of little surprise to most art historians.

Boroditsky has also done a considerable amount of work on time cognition, particularly the use of spatial metaphor for describing and reasoning about time. She has demonstrated, for instance, that different languages use different spatial metaphors, front/back in English, and up/down in Mandarin. It turns out that people use these varying spatial-temporal metaphors even in non-linguistic cognitive tasks, and thus think about time in different ways. Also in terms of spatiotemporal metaphor, one can think of either time moving, as if you are watching a river flow towards you, for instance, as in “the holidays are approaching”, or ego-moving, as if you yourself are moving along a path “we’re rapidly coming to the end of term”. And it turns out you draw on spatial reasoning actively, and being primed with one spatial arrangement or another can affect your performance of temporal reasoning. Furthermore, whether you conceive of time as moving left to right, as English speakers do, or right to left, as Hebrew speakers do, seems to be dependent on the writing direction in your language; as well, different languages conceive of the future either in the front, as in English, or behind, as in Aymara. And in reversing the perspective, ego-moving or time moving, we also reverse the directionality, such as front/back. Thus, in ambiguous statements such as “We moved the meeting forward a day”, forward can be taken to mean more in the future or less in the future. Perhaps most striking are the differences between languages which use body-relative indications of space, as in right and left in English, and languages which use only absolute directions such as cardinal directions (north, south, east, west). The Pormpuraaw languages of Australia, such as Kuuk Thaayorre, are such languages. Speakers of these languages are always aware of their absolute spatial orientation, and furthermore draw on this spatial reasoning for reasoning about time, always arranging pictures in temporal order east to west regardless of the orientation of their own body. Differences in metaphors used for duration of time are also cognitively significant, such as with linear distance in English as in “a long time” and amount in Greek “poli ora” or “much time”.

With many of these effects, Boroditsky has demonstrated that not only does the brain seem to use language online for non-linguistic tasks, which can be demonstrated by running language interference tasks which disable one’s ability to use language in the moment, but also that the effects of language differences are also long-term. Thus bilingual speakers perform differently depending on the linguistic context – they essentially think differently depending on which language they are using. But also, learning a new language can change your cognitive performance even when you are currently using your old language, and can even change how you speak your own language, and thus speakers of languages in which tense-marking is optional have been shown to mark for tense more often if they speak another language which requires tense marking. Of course Lera Boroditsky is not the only scholar working on the question of linguistic relativity, but I mention her work in detail since much of it focusses on language and temporal reasoning, which is of particular interest to me.4

In the next post I’ll touch on some of the more recent reactions to this research and talk a bit about my own take on it.

1 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought & Reality (MIT Press, 1956). [back]

2 Pinker's book The Language Instinct was so persuasive to me, in spite of the fact that I now think he is in many ways fundamentally wrong on this, that I think I was rather too timid in the position I took in my doctoral dissertation. [back]

3 A very broad debate that I can’t go into here but see this article for a thorough treatment of the topic. [back]

4 There is of course much I’ve left out here, such as the “thinking for speaking” model of Dan Slobin, but I wanted to focus mainly on the aspects that are most relevant to my own interests. If you want more information on this topic, you would also be well advised to read Boroditsky’s entry on linguistic relativity in the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, as well as this more detailed and somewhat more critical account from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In future posts I’ll also go into a bit more detail about Boroditsky’s work on time which I’ve summarised above. [back]

Time off and time on

As is no doubt obvious, this blog has gone dormant for a time due to the busy-ness of life, what with kids home for the summer and then a busy academic year. But after this unfortunately extended time off from this blog, I want to pick up where I left off.

As promised ages ago, I first want to write (or rather finish writing) a post that both explains and lays out my position on the the concept of linguistic relativity, and how I think language, thought, and culture are interrelated. I also have few one-off ideas on topics such as semantics, memetics, and the formulaic nature of language, as well as some hopefully fun and light-hearted posts (which I'll keep under wraps for the moment).

But my big plan is to go back to the topic which I've been working on, on and off, for over 15 years now, time in language and thought. My doctoral dissertation was on the coneptualisation of futurity in Old English, and came out of an interest in how English developed from a language that didn't originally have a systematic way of expressing the future, and how this might relate to the Latin language which does have grammatical future tense, the adoption of a new religion, Christianity, which has important conceptual foundations involving a notion of future time, new philosophical concepts such as the free will/predestination debate, etc. So first of all, I'll review some of that research (and how my thinking may have changed in some ways since then), but also much of the attendant background to this topic, about time in general in thought and language, which will give me a chance to write about some of the stuff that was too tangential or just didn't fit with the dissertation.

There has also been an explosion of work over the past decade or so, and particularly in the last couple of years, on topics that relate to this, such as the work by Lera Boroditsky and a number of other scholars on how we use space to think about and talk about time (and also in particular the research by Daniel Casasanto and Vyvyan Evans), or by David Eagleman on time perception, and even popular nonfiction books on time, such as Claudia Hammond's Time Warped and physicist Adam Frank's About Time. My own most recent conference paper dealt in large part with spatio-temporal metaphor in Old English. But in an attempt to keep these posts fairly informal, easily approachable, and not overly wrought, as was my original intention when I started this blog, I'm going to try to write about these topics in an off-the-cuff manner without putting a lot of advanced planning into organization. So they'll be a little haphazard as I jump from one topic to another as I think of them in an attempt to get the ideas down quickly.1

It's often pointed out that time is the most common noun in the English language (and is similarly high ranking in other languages too), and that three of the top five nouns are time-related words (the other two being year and day). Personally, I've always been interested in and maybe even obsessed with the notion of time, how we think about time, how we talk about time. I've always been fascinated by clocks and watches,2 and I've always been drawn to stories about time and especially time travel, such as the tv show Doctor Who and my favorite children's book The Story of the Amulet by E. Nesbit. Even before I started in on my graduate school work I became fascinated in the free will / predestination debate and as an undergraduate read Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and the debate on free will between Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther. Indeed even now I often include a number of texts in my regular teaching rotation that pick up on themes and motifs of time, such as Alice Munro's "Walker Brothers Cowboy", Stephen Leacock's "The Retroactive Existence of Mr Juggins", Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps", and the Christopher Nolan film Memento, so I also want to post about literary representations of time, including more popular forms of literature and entertainment.

So if you're interested in a somewhat chaotic series of reflections on time in language, thought, and culture, then watch this space...3

1 Organizing these ideas into something more cohesive may be a project for a later time. [back]

2 An antique Waltham pocket watch given to me by my mother is one of my prized possessions. [back]

3 I’m hoping that having posted this, I will now be more motivated to follow through with it and do it, but any words of encouragement will certainly help give me a kick in the complacency. [back]

Interconnectivity part 2: The theory of connections

In my previous post on interconnectivity I gave an example of some literary and historical interconnections. Actually this kind of interconnection between people and events is quite easy to find, as demonstrated by this graphic from Lapham's Quarterly.

Probably the most famous examples of this interconnected way of looking at things are the televisions documentaries, books, and magazine articles of James Burke, in particular Connections. Burke showed the often surprising lines of influence that drove scientific innovations. This was a direct challenge to the more linear view of history, and in particular the history of science and technology. Instead of progressing in small incremental steps, Burke sees innovation often taking surprising leaps from one seemingly unconnected area to another, and this kind of cultural influence can be seen in areas other than science (as Burke sometimes demonstrates in his various writings).1 He also has an excellent project on the go called the Knowledge Web, an interactive and visual mapping of these connections for educational purposes (check out the video overview).

A similar example is the book Joined Up Thinking, in which author Stevyn Colgan demonstrates the interconnected nature of a vast array of “trivia”, with often quite entertaining effect. Colgan casts his net much more widely than Burke does, in order to show not the surprising course of innovation but instead the highly interconnected nature of our modern culture.2

Finding these sorts of interconnections is, however, more than just an intellectual parlour game.3 There is a serious point to be made here. First of all, interconnectivity is a property of complex systems, which is a concern not just of scientists and mathematicians, but of social sciences such as economics, sociology, and anthropology, and I would argue that such an approach would be useful for the study of history and culture too. A complex system is any system composed of many interconnected parts, and thereby exhibits properties not obvious from the properties of the individual parts. In colloquial terms, it is more than the sum of its parts. This is a phenomenon called emergence.

Perhaps the most notable example of emergence is the mind which is seen as arising from the complex system of interconnected neurons in the brain. This approach to understanding cognition is known as connectionism. According to this model, human cognition is the result of the interaction of the 100 billion neurons, each of which with several thousand synaptic connections, for a total of several hundred trillion synaptic connections.4 The overall map of these connections is often referred to as the connectome, perhaps most famously by neuroscientist Sebastian Seung, who advanced the proposition "I am my connectome".5 The idea is that, similar to the way your genome makes you physically who you are, your connectome makes you mentally who you are. According to this hypothesis, the pattern of these connections encodes all your thoughts, memories, and personality. It is due to the vast number of connections in the brain that something as complex as cognition is able to arise.6

In addition to cognition generally speaking, the human brain is responsible for producing the specific cognitive faculty of language.7 Unsurprisingly perhaps, interconnectivity is important in language as well, and some of the cognitive approaches to language are based on this. For instance, in frame semantics, the meanings of words or concepts is structured not like a dictionary but like an encyclopedia. That is to say, one cannot understand a word without also knowing an array of related concepts. Thus, to understand the word sell, one must have knowledge a number of related concepts in the domain of financial transactions, such as a buyer, money, etc. Thus, a word evokes an semantic frame or domain of related knowledge, and it is by that frame that we understand the word.8 Sometimes a word can belong in more than one frame, and thus have different meanings depending on context. Bank in the context of a river has a very different meaning than bank in the context of money, and one must have a broad conceptual and cultural understanding to be able to correctly interpret such expressions as “a strong man”, “a strong woman”, “a strong smell”, “a strong argument”, and so on. Thus it is the interaction of words that creates meaning. One can envisage a kind of web of words that collectively produce a meaning not entirely clear from the meanings of the individual words themselves. In a sense, this interconnected property of language is visually represented in the excellent language tool Visual Thesaurus (which you can use in a limited free trial or purchase a subscription). This is an example of a semantic network. See also, the lexical database WordNet, and both WordVis and Lexipedia, which provide graphical representations of the WordNet semantic network in a structure very similar to that of the Visual Thesaurus (and are free to use without a subscription). You can look up words and click between related words which are organised as a set of interconnected nodes to explore whole semantic domains.9

So in a sense, I’m exploring interconnectivity on two levels, the micro level of cognition and language, and on the macro level of culture and history, and further exploring how these systems interact, since language, culture, and thought are constantly interacting and influencing each other. And it is no surprise, given the interconnected nature of our brains that we are pattern recognition machines, and seem to be driven to seek out patterns in the complex world around us.

1 You can see Burke’s various television documentaries on this YouTube channel (including also his documentary on neural connections called The Neuron Suite). There is, of course, a list of his books on Wikipedia, and his Scientific American articles were collected and republished as the book Circles: 50 Round Trips through History, Technology, Science, Culture. Interesting bit of trivia, Burke studied medieval English literature at Oxford University. No wonder I like him so much! [back]

2 Colgan has a follow-up book in the works, Constable Colgan’s Connectoscope. Click here to find out more, and learn how you can support the publication of this book. I highly recommend it. [back]

3 Though it can often be a very fun one to engage in. Try it for yourself! [back]

4 Apparently a 3-year-old child has 1 quadrillion synapses, but this number declines into adulthood. [back]

5 See his TED talk “I am my connectome” and his recent book Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Who We Are. [back]

6 Though there are several projects underway to map connectomes, it’s still a long way away that we’ll be able to do so with the complete human connectome. The only complete connectome mapped is the 302-neuron nervous system of the roundworm C. elegans. However, Seung, through his organisation WiredDifferently, is crowdsourcing scientific research by enlisting the help of volunteers. If you click through to EyeWire, you can play an online game that maps part of a connectome (the neural structure of the retina). It's set up as a game to get people to participate, but it actually helps map the connectome, spreading the work out amongst many people. Crowdsourced scientific research, very cool! Of course lexicographers had this method worked out years ago, making use of volunteer readers contributing words, as with the Oxford English Dictionary. The internet certainly makes it a lot more effective. [back]

7 Which can itself therefore be seen as an emergent phenomenon. [back]

8 The notion of frame semantics was first proposed by Charles J. Fillmore, who explains "by the term 'frame' I have in mind any system of concepts related in such a way that to understand any one of them you have to understand the whole structure in which it fits" ("Frame Semantics", Linguistics in the morning calm, ed. The Linguistic Society of Korea, 111-37, Seoul: Hanshin). [back]

9 Go ahead and play with these language tools, they're lots of fun. It's like getting lost following the links in Wikipedia, only with word meanings! [back]

Bright light

A quick news article post today. This story has been making the rounds online, and is relevant to my earlier discussion of interdisciplinarity. Jonathon Allen, a biochemistry student with an interdisciplinary interest in history, hearing about tree ring evidence for a spike in carbon-14 levels in Japanese cedar trees, which is usually caused by a supernova or solar flares, in the year AD 774, has made the connection with a mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of a strange red crucifix in the sky:

Her Norðhymbra fordrifon heora cyning Alchred of Eoforwic on Eastertid & genamon Æþelred Molles sunu him to hlaforde, se ricsade IIII winter; & men gesegon read Cristes mel on heofenum æfter sunnan setlgange. (ChronD)

Her Norðhymbra fordrifon heora cining Alhred of Eoferwic on Eastertid & genamon Æðelred Molles sunu heom to hlaforde, & se rixade IIII gear; & men gesegon read Cristes mel on heofenum æfter sunnan setlangange. (ChronE)

Her Æðelred Molles sunu rixian agann on Norðhymbran, & menn gesegan read Cristes mæl on heouonum æfter sunnan setlegange; on ðan ylcan geare fuhton Myrce & Centwaræ at Ottefordan & wundorlice nædra wæron gesawene on Suðsexan. (ChronF)

"This year the Northumbrians banished their king, Alred, from York at Easter-tide; and chose Ethelred, the son of Mull, for their lord, who reigned four winters. This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset; the Mercians and the men of Kent fought at Otford; and wonderful serpents were seen in the land of the South-Saxons." (OMACL translation)

He suggests it might have been caused by a supernova partially covered by a dust cloud. This is a nice example of an intersection between history and science. Of course there are many such strange portants recorded in chronicles like these (for instance the odd mention of wonderful snakes in Sussex in the F version of the Chronicle), so it's hard to know what they might mean, but I'd imagine that a medieval or ancient observer is much more reliable than the average modern one. Simply put, they knew their night sky better than we often do, since they had no electric lights. And it's a nice example of a clever insight through interdisciplinary knowledge.

Interconnectivity part 1: A detective story

As promised a couple of posts back, here is the related post on interconnectivity, or rather the first of what will probably be two posts on the topic. I was writing then about interdisciplinarity, essentially how different disciplines and subjects intersect and are interconnected. The underlying principle of this is the interconnectedness in everything in the highly complex phenomenon of our world. This post will be a demonstration of and exploration of the kinds of interconnections possible. In the next post I'll discuss some of the broader implications of interconnectivity.

The great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is famous for his amazing powers of deduction. Using keen observation and deductive reasoning he is able to observe clues and work out the causes that lie behind any circumstance, a skill he frequently uses to solve crimes. He is able to see, in a way that other characters who inhabit Conan Doyle’s stories were not, the way seemingly unconnected facts can relate to one another. Other characters, such as his friend and companion Doctor Watson, are amazed and baffled until Holmes explains the deductive steps that led to his conclusions. Only then does the greater web of clues create a more complete and holistic meaning for both characters in the story and for the readers as well. Presented only with the starting point and the final conclusion, the chain of deductions seems remarkable indeed.¹

This blog post is something of a literary/cultural/historical detective story that begins and ends with Sherlock Holmes. Or rather, it begins with another ‘detective’, Sir Gawain, one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, and the perhaps surprising suggestion that there is a connection between Sherlock Holmes and Sir Gawain. They are both detectives who have to follow a trail to solve a mystery, and they are connected by fascinating literary/historical trail.

A number of years ago, I was teaching a course aimed at first-year university students which focused on literature in the context of the arts and humanities. (It was intended for students who were not English majors.) I decided to take the approach of trying to demonstrate the cultural network that underlies all of western literature, that nothing existed in a vacuum, and that all of history, art, culture, philosophy, and science are inextricably linked. In order to understand the literary texts in the course, we had to examine the world that produced them in all its interconnected complexity. As it turns out, two of the works I decided to include in this course were the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Sherlock Holmes short story “A Scandal in Bohemia”.

Here follows a summary of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for those who are unfamiliar with the story: In the early days of King Arthur’s court, at around the time of Christmas and New Year’s, all the nobles at court were feasting and celebrating, as befits that time of year. At one such feast, surprising everyone, a strangely green intruder burst into the hall riding a strangely green horse. Both horse and man are completely green, and the man carries with him two things, an axe and a holly bob. Holly had the same symbolic connection to Christmas then as it does now — mercy, rebirth, salvation. The axe, both a weapon of battle and the instrument of the executioner’s justice, had a particular lace wrapped about the handle. The strange green intruder proposed a game to the court, an exchange of blows. Gawain accepted the challenge on behalf of his king and court, and struck the head from the Green Knight using the axe. What was even more surprising was that the Green Knight picked up his head, reminded Gawain of his promise to accept a return blow one year later, and then rode out of the hall with his head carried under his arm.

Thus begins Sir Gawain’s detective story. He must gumshoe his way around the countryside trying to track down the Green Chapel where he is to keep his bargain to the Green Knight, and along the way come to grips with the mysterious events that have precipitated this adventure. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Sir Gawain is not an exemplary detective, and he fails to pick up on all the clues presented to him. Surprising, considering that his personal symbol, which he wears emblazoned upon his shield is the Sign of Solomon, a pentangle or five-pointed star also referred to in the poem as the Endless Knot, from which this blog takes its name and logo.² It is so named because of its interconnectedness. One can draw a pentangle without lifting the pen from the page, and each point is connected to two other points of the star. It is indeed an interconnected, endless knot. For Gawain, this symbol represents the interconnected nature of his code of honour as a Knight of the Round Table. Furthermore, its connection to Solomon, a symbol of judgement from the Old Testament, represents his commitment to justice. (Incidentally, on the inside of his shield Gawain has the image of the Virgin Mary, a symbol of mercy, and thus the shield graphically represents the same set of oppositions that the axe and the holly symbolized, justice and mercy.) But although Gawain’s personal symbol is one of interconnectedness, he doesn’t himself grasp the interconnectedness of the events which befall him.

Sir Gawain heads out on a quest to find the Green Knight, and a few days before his appointment at the Green Chapel, Sir Gawain comes upon an unexpected castle in the wilderness where he may celebrate Christmas, quite possibly the last one of his life. The castle is circled by a palisade and moat two miles away, with the grounds within this palisade belonging to the castle. He is warmly welcomed there — perhaps a little too warmly. His host, Lord Bertilak, suggests another game of exchange, this time between daily winnings. The host will go out on a hunt each day and exchange what he manages to catch with whatever Gawain wins staying home in the castle each day. Unsurprisingly the host manages to hunt down various animals, namely a deer, a boar, and a fox. Gawain’s daily winnings are somewhat more unusual. Each day his host’s wife, Lady Bertilak, who is the femme fatale of this detective story, visits Gawain in his bedchamber and attempts to seduce him, having heard of his fame as chivalrous knight of King Arthur’s court who is as successful at wooing women as he is fighting on the battlefield. Gawain, of course is in something of a quandary, having agreed to the game of exchange. Anything he ‘wins’ must be passed along to his host at the end of the day. Each day Gawain manages to squirm his way out of having an affair with Lady Bertilak, accepting only kisses from her, which he dutifully passes on to the host each evening.³

However, on the third day he finally breaks his word. Lady Bertilak offers him her lace girdle, and if this seems a sexually charged gift, it is. She offers him an undergarment in much the same way that a groupie would throw her underwear at a rockstar today, given Gawain’s rockstar fame as one of the Knights of the Round Table. Only it’s not just any underwear, it’s magic underwear! Lady Bertilak tells him that if he wears this lace, he will be impervious to any harm. Now Gawain has a way of surviving the fateful encounter with the Green Knight, but only if he breaks his word and doesn’t give up his winnings to his host that evening, and this is exactly what he does. Perhaps had Gawain not been so concerned for his life, not only would he have not broken his word, he might also have picked up on the clues that he was being set up. He had all the information he needed to deduce the meaning of this mystery, but unlike Sherlock Holmes, he fails to see the connections. He had in fact already before seen the lace the wife gave to him, around the handle of the axe the Green Knight was carrying. And upon arriving at the castle, he was told the Green Chapel was not two miles away, and therefore within the walls surrounding the castle grounds. But he doesn’t connect these and other clues to come to the conclusion that all these events are interconnected, and that the outcome of the exchange of winnings game is tied to the outcome of the exchange of blows game. As it turns out, the Green Knight, who is also his host at the castle in a magical green disguise, judges his error to be a minor one, and only scratches Gawain with the axe. Gawain, however, learns his lesson. He chose poorly, picking the axe of judgement rather than the holly bough of mercy, and didn’t fully live up to his code of honour as a knight.

Thus ends this detective story, one part of the larger cycle of Arthurian legends and romances. The Arthurian stories encapsulate the medieval mindset perhaps better than any other works of literature, with conflicts between religious belief, martial conquest, devotion to women in the courtly love tradition, and personal codes of honour. Of course, to a large extent, this was an imaginary world. Already, in the middle ages, writers were looking back on a golden age of chivalry which never really existed, at least not in the way it was portrayed in courtly romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But it was a powerful and resonant set of images and ideas, one which continued to be drawn upon by writers in successive ages.

One such later age which drew heavily upon the medieval was the Victorian period. Many Victorian writers, artists, and thinkers, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin, looked to the medieval for imagery, ideas, and inspiration. Again, it was something of a romanticisation of a medieval golden age that never really existed in quite that way, but it was nevertheless a major part of the Victorian aesthetic. Tennyson is often thought of as the quintessential Victorian poet, reflecting all the many cluttered aspects of Victorianism, including Victorian medievalism. One of his most famous poems is Idyls of the King, a poetic retelling of the Arthurian story (though not the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Tennyson’s poem is an attempt at writing the great British epic, with the Arthurian story reflecting on the British monarchy. Indeed, Tennyson frequently reflects the concerns of his day – everything from the conflict between faith and science, which was brought into sharp focus by the new evolutionary theories of the day, to the appalling social conditions that resulted from industrialisation, sharply contrasted by the pastoral world of Arthurian legend. Indeed, Tennyson was officially adopted as the poetic voice of the age when he was named Poet Laureate.

One particular national issue which Tennyson wrote about after being named Poet Laureate was in his other most famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.⁴ This poem tells the story of a disastrous attack in the Crimean War. A misunderstood order caused the Light Brigade to charge, and they were all slaughtered. Tennyson seems to be celebrating the heroism of doing one’s duty and courage in the face of defeat, qualities at the heart of the Victorian self image. It was at the order of the commander of the British forces, Lord Raglan, that this disastrous attack was made.

Speaking of Lord Raglan, or more properly FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, his great-grand-son FitzRoy Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan, also commonly known as Lord Raglan, was most famous for his scholarly work on the hero figure, and wrote about a variety of legendary heroes, including King Arthur. Raglan’s approach is to analyse the hero myth pattern that underlies such stories, such as Gawain’s journey in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

But getting back to Raglan senior and the Crimean War, the general poor organisation and appalling conditions endured by the troops were written about by the world’s first war correspondent William Howard Russell. Russell’s dispatches, published in The Times, created much controversy and uproar back home, and as a result Raglan ordered his officers not to talk to Russell. But not before Russell’s stories brought Florence Nightingale, along with a team of nurses she trained, to Crimea to see to those poor conditions being suffered by the troops.

Florence Nightingale became famous for her pioneering efforts in wartime nursing. But she wasn’t the only notable nurse involved with the Crimean War. Rather less well known than Nightingale is the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole.⁵ Seacole travelled from Jamaica to England to volunteer as a nurse for the Crimean War soldiers, bringing her knowledge of tropical medicine (with herbal and folk remedies). She was rebuffed by the authorities (at least in part due to racial prejudice, since she was of mixed race). Seacole managed to raise the money independently, and she went anyway, setting up her own hotel for the care of wounded soldiers, which she financed by selling food and drink to the soldiers. She is notable for sometimes treating soldiers on the battlefield under fire. Though the soldiers and military commanders seemed to appreciate her efforts, Nightingale herself was dismissive of Seacole, and after the war ended she returned to England destitute. Her plight was brought to public attention in part through Punch magazine, the famous satirical Victorian periodical.⁶

There was something of an explosion in periodicals in the 19th century, driven in part by cheaper paper and advances in printing technology. This allowed for low-cost, mass-circulation periodicals, which coupled with increased literacy rates led to a market for popular literature, literature for the masses. Indeed there was a mini-explosion of printed media in the 19th century, what with the periodicals, the proliferation of broadsheet newspapers, and the penny dreadfuls, which led to a kind of information overload similar in effect to the digital media explosion of our own time. This in turn led to more and more affective and even sensational content in order to grab the attention of the readers.

Richard “Dickie” Doyle was a famous Victorian illustrator who drew the Punch magazine’s first cover, and therefore designed the Punch masthead used for over a century. Doyle contributed various illustrations for the magazine,⁷ as well as illustrations for a variety of famous Victorian authors such as Dickens, Ruskin, Thackeray, and Leigh Hunt, often signing his initials RD with a dickie bird standing on top (see the bottom left corner of the image above). Richard Doyle’s nephew came to prominence, feeding the public desire for sensational content such as stories about crime and other lurid topics, in the pages of another famous Victorian periodical, The Strand Magazine, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes.

So here the trail ends, from one “detective” to another. In my final, half-improvised lecture to my students, I outlined this connection, which touched on several of the texts and historical contexts we had examined in the course. The point was (and is) that all these things are connected one way or another and to study any one of them inevitably leads to an unending trail of connections. Stay tuned for Interconnectivity part 2, wherein I discuss some of the theoretical background to interconnectedness, and explain why I’m so concerned with this...⁸

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¹ Here's an excerpt from "A Scandal in Bohemia" which demonstrates this:

"Wedlock suits you," he remarked. "I think, Watson, that you have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you."

"Seven!" I answered.

"Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you intended to go into harness."

"Then, how do you know?"

"I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?"

"My dear Holmes," said I, "this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can't imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out."

He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.

"It is simplicity itself," said he; "my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant bootslitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession."

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. "When I hear you give your reasons," I remarked, "the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours."

"Quite so," he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. "You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room."

"Frequently."

"How often?"

"Well, some hundreds of times."

"Then how many are there?"

"How many? I don't know."

"Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed."

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² The blog URL uses the phrase "endless round", since The Endless Knot was already taken. The phrase "endless round" was used in the poem Pearl, in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and written by the same poet. It describes the image of the pearl, a symbol of perfection, and connected, I believe, with Gawain's pentangle. [back]

³ It's really quite a sexually charged poem, with kinky bondage sex-talk between the host's wife and Sir Gawain, and the implication of potential homosexual sexual favours between Gawain and his host. Medieval literature is by no means prudish and boring! [back]

⁴ If you've never heard this before, have a listen to this wax cylinder recording of Tennyson himself reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade". Amazing! [back]

⁵ You can read her own autobiography here. [back]

⁶ The poem published in Punch magazine is entitled "A Stir for Seacole". [back]

⁷ Though not as far as I can tell the one of Seacole. [back]

⁸ I hereby dedicate this blog post to Stevyn Colgan. If you want to read more interconnected detective stories, click here to read the first two chapters of his new book Constable Colgan's Connectoscope, and click here to sponsor the book and make sure it gets published. [back]