regshoe | Entries tagged with meta

Pacing is a point that's repeatedly come up as I've been reviewing adaptations of Kidnapped. It's interesting to compare which parts of the story different adaptations choose to spend more or less time on, and frustrating that there seems to be a tendency to spend more time on what are IMO the less fannishly appealing and historically interesting parts of the story (viz., the Alan-less and non-Highland bits). Then I thought, this is something I can analyse with numbers and graphs!

( So, which adaptation is the most faithful in its pacing? The answer may surprise you! )

It's been a while since I've done any of this figuring-out-canon-details meta, and writing this reminded me how much fun it can be :)

Anyway: where is the house of Shaws?

( Ooh, Cramond, fancy! )

I've just re-read Witching Hill by E. W. Hornung, ahead of nominating it for Yuletide. This was one of my favourites when I did my Hornung read-through project, and having this chance to appreciate it better, I now like it even more. (In objective quality I think it ranks below Fathers of Men—but it's more inventive, besides being intriguing and loads of fun.)

Perhaps it's a fortunate coincidence that I've recently watched the 1970 TV adaptation of The Owl Service (thoughts to follow in a general TV post once I've finished the new series of Doctor Who), and that

sovay was just talking about re-reading the book, because Witching Hill is really rather an interesting book to put next to it. Both are about past events replaying themselves, the inexorable ongoing presence of the past in a particular place, 'not haunted' (as Gwyn puts it in The Owl Service), 'more like—still happening?'. In The Owl Service it's suggested that Huw and Gwyn are descendants of Lleu or Gwydion, and their presence in the valley starts off the mythological events repeating again; in Witching Hill Uvo Delavoye is a descendant of Lord Mulcaster, and it's suggested that his presence on the Estate similarly revives the past. Witching Hill doesn't have the numinous menace of The Owl Service—it's not that it isn't serious in approaching its subject matter, nor that the stakes are any lower, but it is basically a set of fun adventure stories rather than a weird disturbing mythological-fantasy-horror novel. And yet...

The characters in The Owl Service talk about their situation in terms of hydroelectric dams, batteries and plug wiring, and the replaying myth can perfectly well accommodate tampering with the brakes of a motorbike among its significant events. The contrast between present and past—the difference in time being much less, only a little more than a century, but strong enough in mood—was something I noted in Witching Hill the first time through; it's sometimes comic in its juxtaposition of late-Victorian suburban respectability with larger-than-life Georgian aristocratic depravity, but I think it goes a bit deeper too. I appreciated Uvo Delavoye better this time round, and much of what I appreciated was how modern he is psychologically and temperamentally; how significant is the connection between him and the past; how those two things interact with each other, and the role of his not-very-subtle subtextual queerness in this situation. Uvo lives with his mother on the Witching Hill Estate, after having suffered a vaguely-described physical illness whose long-term effects keep him from being fit for work; he's seriously unhappy about this state of affairs, apparently less because he loves work for its own sake and more because of ideas about being useless/a burden/not a proper man ('And I'm such a help to them [his mother and sister] as I am, aren't I? Think of the bread I win and all the dollars I'm raking in!'); his mental illness reaches a peak of suicidal prominence and severity in 'Under Arms', under the influence—at least so he believes—of his 'old man of the soil'. Uvo and his narratorial foil Gilly argue about the happenings on the Estate, Gilly refusing to accept the supernatural explanation of which Uvo is convinced; Gilly repeatedly describes Uvo's preoccupation with it using words like 'morbid' and 'unwholesome', and both he and Uvo himself use the word 'degenerate'. Earlier in the book we had a reminder from the conservative, ultra-conventional Berridges that mental health problems are, culturally, a modern phenomenon ('We don't believe in them. We think they're a modern excuse for anything you like to do or say; that's what we think about nerves.'), and in that same story, 'A Vicious Circle', Uvo says this, contrasting his own mental constitution vis-a-vis heterosexual relationships with that of Guy Berridge (who's being pulled out of happiness in his engagement, clearly against his own nature, by the old man of the soil):

'What has he ever done, in all his dull days, to make that harmless mind a breeding-ground for every sort of degenerate idea? In mine they'd grow like mustard and cress. I'd feel just like that if I were engaged to the very nicest girl; the nicer she was, the worse I'd get; but then I'm a degenerate dog in any case. Oh, yes, I am, Gilly.'

(this passage follows on some quotations from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, btw)

...What I'm saying is that all this is terribly interesting when you start to pull at it a bit, right???

In The Owl Service Huw says of the still-happening Blodeuwedd, 'She is coming, and will use what she finds...'; I think Lord Mulcaster is using what he finds in the modern morbidity of Uvo Delavoye's psyche too.

And then there's the final story, 'The Temple of Bacchus', in which Uvo has not quite begun, but is being tempted towards, an unwise relationship with an unhappily married woman, Mrs Ricardo. We might remember that the last time Lord Mulcaster influenced someone's love life it was against the man's own nature—conventionally heterosexual in that case, with plenty of significant Oscar Wilde quotations to hint at what Lord Mulcaster's undermining of it might mean. Uvo himself identifies this affair as the influence of the 'old man of the soil' on them both, and escapes from the endlessly-repeating pattern of the past by exerting his own will to give up Mrs Ricardo, leave Witching Hill itself, and run away to Scotland with his best friend Gilly (who earlier in this story is more-or-less explicitly jealous of Mrs Ricardo, whom he describes as having usurped his own place in Uvo's life and heart).

This is really pretty interesting, right...???

(And I suppose the resolution of The Owl Service can also be understood as a choice to reject the destructively heterosexual narrative of the present past: Roger resigns his place in the manly love rivalry with Gwyn and reminds Alison/Blodeuwedd that she is flowers on the mountain, and not what either of the men made her.)

Here is the draft timeline, and here is the logic of how I worked it out and the problems encountered. It's a tricky one; as I remarked earlier, there are five exact dates in the book and every one of them is at least difficult to reconcile with other information given about the timeline, if not definitely contradictory. Again, I would much appreciate any thoughts you have here on the counting, reasoning, decisions made or anything else.

( Bit of a tl;dr here, I'm afraid... )

Robert Louis Stevenson's father originally intended that his son should follow his own profession, lighthouse engineering, and was disappointed when Louis chose instead to pursue a literary life. However, RLS made the right decision in not becoming an engineer; as an inspection of the text of Kidnapped reveals, he could not do maths.

As with my Raffles and Flight of the Heron timelines, I'll make another post detailing how I worked all this out and the various problems involved. I'm putting this on Dreamwidth before publishing it on the website partly because it is so difficult, and I'm afraid I may have missed things, lost count or made errors in logic somewhere. If you would like to, I'd much appreciate any criticism of the counting and reasoning detailed in these two posts!

( The timeline... )

At long last, here it is. Aww, I am pleased to have made an ebook of such a favourite as this. :)

The Gutenberg uploader volunteers were particularly speedy this time; the ebook was up and on the site about four hours after I submitted it this morning, so that was a nice surprise! Many thanks to them, and to

sanguinity for proofreading.

I have also made my own cover image for this ebook. Gutenberg ebooks can use a picture of the actual book's cover as the cover image only if it has the title and author's name on it, but many old books don't (having them on the spine instead), and FotH is one of these. In that case you can use a scan of the title page, but that's not terribly visually interesting, and I wanted my fave to have a nice-looking cover; so I made this one, trying to imitate the appearance of the original book while adding the title and author's name in an attractive style.

Now, I could have thought this was a bit redundant, there of course already being a free ebook on Faded Page. But I don't think so. Partly this is because Gutenberg is a far more well-known site; people will check there for ebooks who don't know about and wouldn't think to look on Faded Page, and more people will have the opportunity to stumble across it on Gutenberg. But another reason is that the two ebooks are based on different editions of the printed book—my Gutenberg ebook uses the 1925 first edition, while the Faded Page one uses an edition from 1932—and this gave me the chance to compare the texts side-by-side (using an R script) and see what changes Broster made to the text between those dates!

( Here is what I found... )

I've been adding bits and pieces to the website over the last few weeks (and have made a 'Latest additions' section for the front page, for handy navigation thereof), and here's a new meta piece—which I shall experiment with posting there and linking here with a few more informal notes.

The language of Kidnapped: Dialogue tags (with a comparison to Flight of the Heron)

This was an interesting investigation! I started by basically just repeating the same things I'd done for FotH, and ended up finding some illustrations of what I think are the general differences between Broster's and Stevenson's writing styles. Further comparison of more general features of the two books—perhaps looking at things like sentence and paragraph length, proportion of dialogue, punctuation and vocabulary—would be very much worth doing to throw further light on this.

Only two of my four Kidnapped fics are in canon-style first person (well, one of the others is in first person but it barely has any dialogue). I see I do use Stevenson's favourite 'Dialogue,' said pronoun construction, though I don't manage such a strong bias towards it as Stevenson has. And I've never tried to use present-tense dialogue tags in an otherwise past-tense fic; given the commonness of errors in tense use as mistakes in fic I feel it's a risky move to try doing it deliberately, but perhaps I will try for a better canon pastiche the next time I want to write a really exciting first-person adventure fic. :D

( Or, an investigation into the textual history of Kidnapped )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: I feel I ought to make a Sound of Music joke here

These are some more thoughts arising out of the research I did to put together the FotH Wikipedia article, which involved sorting through decades' worth of writing about and references to The Flight of the Heron on the Internet Archive and other places. Going through the sources over time like this, one gets a broad sweep of general opinion about the book, and a view of how ideas about it have developed over time. ( So here are some of the more interesting things I've found... )

At long last, I have acquired a first edition of The Flight of the Heron! This brings my number of physical copies to three. The first two are a 1993 paperback omnibus edition of FotH and its sequels, which is nice enough but it's a bit unwieldy and I don't really want the other two books right there whenever I'm reading FotH, and a 1979 hardback from the original publisher with an impressive list of 'reprinted' years on the copyright page, which is nice enough as a physical book but which has picked up a lot of printing errors over those years of new reprints; that neither of these was really ideal was one of my reasons for wanting to get a first edition. It is in fact a very nice book, a fairly typical-looking early twentieth-century cloth-bound hardback, in decent condition, and well-formatted in details in the way that ebooking has given me a new appreciation for.

Another reason for wanting a first edition was, in fact, ebooking; as you all know there is an ebook on Canadian public domain ebook site Faded Page, but there's none as yet on Project Gutenberg, and for copyright law reasons it's not possible just to transfer the Faded Page ebook across. It seems a bit of a waste of effort to start from scratch making a new ebook for Gutenberg, but—Gutenberg being the biggest and best-known public domain ebook site—I think it might be worth doing. We'll see.

Another reason for wanting a first edition is that it—and, apparently, no subsequent editions—has a really nice map on the endpapers, which

luzula has posted a picture of. This is useful!

The location of Ardroy can, as I've posted about before, be deduced fairly precisely from the text; it corresponds to a real small glen in between Glengarry and Lochiel's lands around Loch Arkaig. The map agrees with this location, though I think it gets the shape of Loch na h-Iolaire wrong. It shows the loch as an oblong angled east-west and about twice as long as it is wide, whereas Broster describes it as 'little more than a mile long, and at its greatest breadth perhaps a quarter of a mile wide'; that it points roughly north-south is suggested by the shape of the real glen, and I think can also be inferred from the text (in chapter 1.2 Ewen and Keith approach the house of Ardroy from the pass in the southeast corner of the real glen by going west, 'in the face of the sunset afterglow', and reach the house by 'skirting the end of the little lake'). Other things we can infer about the loch: it has a 'northern shore', on which Lachlan is standing in the prologue, so is probably blunt rather than pointy at the northern end; the creag ruadh is on the western bank near the middle (in the prologue Ewen and Alison sit '[b]etween the red crag and the spot where he had rated his foster-brother that morning', and Ben Tee is on the far side of the loch). The Allt Buidhe burn is crossed in going from Achnacarry to the house of Ardroy; possibly it's a tributary of the real Abhainn Chia-aig. It might have the same course as the real Allt Coire Odhar Beag, which flows from east to west across the southern end of the glen, or it might flow out of the loch to join Abhainn Chia-aig.

The map also shows a second fictional location, that of Ben Loy/Beinn Laoigh: according to the map it's here, just north of where the River Tarff starts to bend southwest. I think this is consistent with the text: in chapter 3.3 Keith leaves the military road between Inverness and Fort Augustus 'just before the road reared itself from the levels of Whitebridge to climb to its highest elevation', hoping to find a short cut to the Corryarrick; Guthrie's camp is on the military road between Fort Augustus and the Corryarrick, 'some miles from the top of the pass'; on the way there from Beinn Laoigh Keith and Guthrie cross the Tarff, and on the way back the distance is 'not so great as he [Keith] had feared'. Beinn Laoigh is therefore north of the Tarff, west of the Corryarrick, and sufficiently far west that the road—which at this point is heading southeast towards the pass—is not too far away. I might put it slightly further west than the map, but I think the map's location is about as good as we can do. In real life there's a sort of plateau here with several small tarns above where the ground rises steeply from the river; I suppose in the book's geography the slope might be more gentle near the river (it doesn't seem to be very precipitous on Keith and Guthrie's journey) with more of a mountain summit further up.

Finally, a minor mystery! My omnibus copy of the book has a footnote to chapter 5.5 saying that Morar is pronounced 'Móar', which puzzled me slightly because that's definitely not how it's pronounced now. But Christopher Duffy in Fight for a Throne lists the same silent-R pronunciation in an appendix of regional and period pronunciations, and I was willing to accept Broster's and Duffy's combined authority for that being the correct period pronunciation. But in the first edition the footnote says 'Mórar' with the first R still intact—and, looking back through my other copies, it's also that way in the 1979 hardback, while the Faded Page ebook appears not to have the footnote at all. So where does this leave us? Perhaps it's a printing error in the omnibus—but then it's a bit funny that a printing error accidentally recreates what is, according to Duffy, a real historical pronunciation. Perhaps it's a printing error in the first edition which was later corrected—but then why is the original version still there in the 1979 hardback? Part of the mystery is that I'm not at all sure what distinction 'Mórar' as opposed to 'Morar' is supposed to communicate to an English speaker—the only thing I can think of is putting the stress on the first syllable rather than the second, which I think most people would do anyway—and this inclines me to think it's an error. This is odd! If any of you have other editions of the book, what do they have here?

“And how is yourself, Cluny?” said Alan. “I hope ye do brawly, sir. And I am proud to see ye, and to present to ye my friend the Laird of Shaws, Mr. David Balfour.”

Alan never referred to my estate without a touch of a sneer, when we were alone; but with strangers, he rang the words out like a herald.

As useful research for my WIP, I've been investigating names in Kidnapped. ( Here is what I've found... )

( Various rambling about my own fic titles and fic titles in general )

Here's how I put the timeline together! In several places, historical dates are of use for dating events in the novel, and my main source for these was Christopher Duffy's book Fight for a Throne: The Jacobite '45 Reconsidered.

( Explanation of the timeline (long!) )

And that's it! Again, please do comment with corrections, additions, arguments etc. In particular, I suspect there may be more information on Keith's backstory in Gleam in the North, but I didn't revisit that book for this timeline, so if you've read it more recently and it does have anything to contribute, do say so.

This is a complete timeline for The Flight of the Heron, compiled from the various references to dates and times throughout the book. This was an easier task than for Raffles, as FotH is a single mostly-linear narrative, quite specifically placed in real history, and doesn't contradict itself, and Broster is usually fairly generous with giving precise dates and lengths of time for the events she narrates. In a few places I've arbitrarily decided on a specific date within the possible range given by canon, but there are no outright guesses. This follow-up post goes into detail on how I put the timeline together.

( The timeline! )

Feel free to point out any errors or omissions, or comment on anything else you think is relevant. I hope this is a useful fandom resource. :)

D. K. Broster and E. W. Hornung have a lot in common: both authors of romantic adventure stories writing around the early twentieth century, both got their start publishing short stories and poetry in magazines before writing novels and story collections, both provide lots of fuel for slash fanfiction—and, of course, they're both my faves. So, having done some meta looking at the details of language in the prose of both authors, I thought I'd continue the series with a comparison between them.

This post uses the texts of the Raffles books (The Amateur Cracksman, The Black Mask, A Thief in the Night and Mr Justice Raffles) by E. W. Hornung and The Flight of the Heron by D. K. Broster.

( Stats, etc. )

This ballad is included by Child, not under its own number, but as an appendix to ballad 215, 'Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow, or, the Water o Gamrie'. Both 'Annan Water' and 'Rare Willie' belong to a group of ballads about people meeting their deaths by drowning which, in the way of folk songs, mix up with each other in the evolution of oral tradition, swap verses back and forth and share various important story elements. I imagine it must have been a bit of a headache deciding how to classify them under discrete ballad numbers. The texts of 'Rare Willie' (Child gives eight of them) differ quite a bit from each other, and several have a lot in common with ballad number 216, 'The Mother's Malison, or, Clyde's Water'—but they don't have so very much, besides the basic drowning plot, in common with 'Annan Water'.

Here, our unnamed protagonist is trying to cross the river Annan in order to see his love, Annie. After tiring out one horse and changing to another, he tries to persuade the boatman to take him across the river, but the boatman refuses. Desperate, he resorts to swimming across; the raging water overcomes him, and he drowns. It's a simpler, vaguer plot than 'Rare Willie' and 'Clyde's Water', but contains some lovely imagery and intriguing suggestions, and it's been a favourite of mine for a while, but I didn't know very much about its history and variations—so I decided to find out some more and do a post on it!

( Some opinions and lyrical detail )

Having looked at the use of different names in The Flight of the Heron, I was inspired by some recent discussions on the Crime and Cricket Discord to try doing something similar for the Raffles stories.

( My dear rabbit... )

I think it's the time of year for ballads—I've been listening to and thinking about them a lot over the last few weeks. I think I said a while ago that I wanted to do some more occasional in-depth posts about the ballads, so here is one, on Child ballad 233, 'Andrew Lammie' or 'Mill o' Tifty's Annie', which is one of my favourites.

The plot, basically: Annie, the miller's daughter at Mill o' Tifty near Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, falls in love with Andrew Lammie, a trumpeter in the employ of Lord Fyvie. Her family disapprove because Andrew is a servant and therefore not good enough for Annie; they escalate from taunting to physical abuse, culminating in her murder by her brother. This story is supposedly historical, although I think the authenticity is a bit doubtful (historical ballads often are!). Like many of the ballads it's a tragic story of doomed love, and I like it for the interesting imagery and the things it has to say about the society it's set in, besides the story and the nice tune.

The first recording I heard was the one by Kate Rusby, which I now think is a bit lacking as an interpretation, but I still like it. It's actually one of the more unique recordings, as can be seen on the chart below—Rusby includes several of the vaguer, more poetic verses from Child texts A and B which are often omitted from more straightforward narrative recordings. I especially like the imagery of her opening two verses, and the final two ('...but now that I must walk alone/For I will not see my dearie' is an understatedly lovely way to end). On the other hand she leaves out so many of the 'narrative' verses that a lot of the detail of the plot is lost, to the point that it becomes difficult to follow. The instrumentation is a bit over the top, but I like her take on the tune (all the recordings I've found use the same basic tune, a lovely classic ballad-y one, but there are lots of small differences and variations on it). Of the more traditional ballad-style recordings my favourite is Jean Redpath's—lovely voice, lovely storytelling in both the choice of verses and the performance.

( Some analysis of recordings of the ballad, and some opinions about it )

Language meta, part three!

One of my favourite things about stories with historical—specifically eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British—settings is all the beautiful subtlety of characterisation, relationship development and intimacy that can be conveyed through the level of formality of the names characters use for each other. I thought it'd be interesting to investigate this topic as applied to Flight of the Heron, a book which features a carefully-delineated relationship progression and quite a bit of emotional repression. Thanks to

luzula for encouraging me to do so :)

( Another long post! )

I was musing about the different styles of dialogue tag used in fiction, and thought this would be another interesting topic to investigate in the language of Flight of the Heron.

First of all, some definitions: for the purposes of this post, a dialogue tag is a verb which has a piece of dialogue as its object—most often the word 'said', as in 'Do not be a fool!' said the young man in the loch.
( More long-winded language nerdery... )