Unrelated, but boy do I wish I were an anthropology major in college right about now so that I could write a bombing thesis on why doing the hokey pokey at Hurricane Florence in the hopes that she’ll turn herself around is a seemingly legitimate modernized attempt at animistic folk magic.
You ever just put together the puzzle pieces of a few historical fun facts that you already know and suddenly, they mean much more than they did independently?
You theatre history/ Shakespeare geeks out there probably know that Richard Burbage was the actor who originated almost all of Shakespeare’s greatest leading roles. He was also a co-owner and -founder of the Globe Theater. But not everyone knows how the Globe came to be.
Burbage’s dad, James Burbage, was a carpenter by trade, but his passion was theatre. He built the first theater in London, appropriately named The Theater, and got involved in running a few others. He was an actor, businessman, architect- he did it all.
When he died in 1597, there were disputes over the land where the Theater was built, and the owner wanted to tear it down. Richard Burbage and his brother owned the Theater, but not the land. So the Burbage boys and more actors of the Lord Chamberlain’s men (probably including Shakespeare), pulled down the timbers of the Theater overnight and rowed them across the Thames River to construct a whole new theater, the Globe, on the south bank. Talk about actors taking part in striking and loading in sets!
The Globe took a while to complete, but one of the first shows performed there was Hamlet. Much has been said about the fact that Shakespeare had lost his own son, whose name was Hamnet, a few years earlier and many people believe that Shakespeare played the Ghost of the King, separated from his son by the veil of life and death.
But I have never seen anyone mention before that the original actor to play Hamlet, Richard Burbage, had lost his father, the man who had doubtless been his reason for getting into both show business and business, period. Performing those lines on a stage built out of the timbers his father had first assembled, continuing an industry his father had started with a hand in all facets of the trade… Wouldn’t he feel a bit like the ghost of his father lived on in the Globe?
oh so i’m a “gatekeeper” just because i own this gate and won’t open it unless you bribe me or solve my riddles three?
Instead of sitting on campus waiting for class to start, I would much rather be riding on horseback across a Scottish moor, clad in woolen skirts with deep pockets, knitting a sock and nibbling on some cheese while my horse carries me dutifully back towards my cozy cottage where a fire is crackling merrily in the hearth to ward against the early September chill.
Christopher Tolkien explains why his father, JRR Tolkien, wrote down “The Hobbit” in the first place, when it was originally intended to be an oral bedtime story for his children.
(found in the forward to The Hobbit Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1987)
Baile-na-cille overlooking Uig Bay on the Isle of Lewis.
Baile na Cille is a low promontory at the north end of the Uig Sands, overlooking the wide expanse of beach with the mountains of Uig and Harris rising to the south. This area is believed to have been worshipped for many centuries.
On the shore are the scant remains of a ruined chapel in an ancient graveyard, which possibly sits on an even older site. Next to the graveyard lies what is though to be the remains of the old thatched church, which was replaced in the 1820s by Baile na Cille Church and the Baile na Cille Guest House, originally Baile na Cille Manse built in 1784.
According to local folklore, the Brahan Seer, a legendary Scottish clairvoyant named Kenneth MacKenzie, was born at Baile na Cille around 1600. One legend suggests that he gained his occult powers when he was given a magic stone by faeries. Another version states that late one evening Kenneth MacKenzie’s mother was herding cattle near the old cemetery, when suddenly all the graves opened up. The spirits left their graves and roamed. Soon all but one had returned. Mrs Mackenzie bravely walked up to the grave and jammed it open with her distaff and until the last spirit returned. It was the ghost of a Norwegian princess who had been lost at sea. She was so impressed by the woman’s bravery that she told her to seek a particular blue stone from a nearby loch for her youngest son, Kenneth. It was this blue, transparent stone that gave him the second sight.
The Brahan Seer is often considered as a ‘Scottish Nostradamus’ and many of his predictions were straightforward and literal. He made predictions of the roof of a specific church collapsing when a magpie made a nest in it for three years in a row, the birth of a two headed calf, a boulder falling over and the plaintive death of a French expatriate in the Isles, mourned by a local woman.
The Brahan Seer cast the stone away, never to be found again by mortal man, and was eventually burnt to death as sorcerer in a barrel of burning tar.
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