Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

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It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

Monthly post for all your debunk or debate requests. Top level comments need to be either a debunk request or start a discussion.

Please note that R2 still applies to debunk/debate comments and include:

• A summary of or preferably a link to the specific material you wish to have debated or debunked.
• An explanation of what you think is mistaken about this and why you would like a second opinion.

Do not request entire books, shows, or films to be debunked. Use specific examples (e.g. a chapter of a book, the armour design on a show) or your comment will be removed.

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Architecture and design podcast 99% Invisible is nearing the end of its year-long read-through of The Power Broker celebrating the book's 50th anniversary. Hosts Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan have provided a very detailed and thoughtful analysis of the text itself, and their banter and interviews are genuinely entertaining, no easy task given the subject matter.

What's odd is they seem to be broadcasting from a universe where this is the only book about Robert Moses.

The Power Broker still stands as a great work of research, but in the 50 years since its release we have learned a lot more about New York and the crisis it and other postwar American cities faced. We have better perspective now than Caro did in 1974 on how things like federal policies and societal trends influenced urban planning through different periods of the 20th century. We can also see that many of the ills chalked up to Robert Moses didn't get better during the period of austerity and decentralization that emerged in reaction to the Moses era, a period we haven't fully emerged from. We can see that some things got worse.

So it's a little disappointing when the hosts brush aside decades of newer perspectives and announce they'll stay firmly planted in 1974.

Roman Mars: You know, over the years, certain other reassessments and some criticisms of the book have sort of bubbled up to the surface. And we’re going to actually talk about some of those, I think, over the course of the year as we go through the parts of the book. But I have to say, most of them are not as compelling to me as the book, The Power Broker.

Elliott Kalan: It’s difficult. It’s such an amazingly written book. Robert Caro put so much work into it. He has documents to back up everything he’s saying....To undermine The Power Broker in a truly effective way would take such an enormous outlay of energy and time and patience–the kind of thing really only Robert Caro has in him.

Roman Mars: That’s right. You need a Robert Caro to take on Robert Caro. (Episode 2)

As of this writing there is only one episode left to be released and the hosts have not spent time discussing other specific works. But even that misses the point. Newer ideas and perspectives would ideally be woven into all their conversations, in particular their interviews with modern-day planners and activists.

It's true, no one has neatly packaged 50 years worth of output into a single follow-up in the way the hosts seem to want which, I think, gets to heart of the issue: The Power Broker is an excellent narrative, akin to a work of fiction. Their guests say as much:

MIKE SCHUR: I started reading it, and I just tore through it. I read it in two weeks. And I thought, when I was done, “That’s the greatest novel I’ve ever read.” That’s how I thought about it. It’s certainly the greatest book I’ve ever read, but I thought of it as a novel. (Episode 6)

This at least helps clarify their approach. No one wants their favorite novel to be nitpicked or re-written piece by piece over the years. Unless Caro releases a sequel, there's only one book in the canon. This is a Caro fandom podcast first and foremost.

In the end I only feel compelled to post this because I believe this fandom reaches much farther than a single podcast. The book has a big following and, as evidenced by some of their interviews, it's easy to find people who will discuss it as gospel. Unfortunately a multipart series by a popular podcast feels like a missed opportunity to advance the conversation.

###Caro's Narrative

ELLIOTT KALAN: ...[Moses is] kind of doing to New York, in a way, what Donald Trump seems to want to do with the United States in making it not a system of elections and checks but instead a system that uses raw power to respond to the desires of one person and the plans of one person. And it’s very chilling. It’s a very chilling thing. (Episode 8)

When The Power Broker came out New York was in the depths of a fiscal crisis and it was impossible not to conclude that mid-century urban renewal projects like downtown highways, slum clearance and public housing had utterly failed to deliver on their promise. In the 1970s people across the political spectrum called for small government, privatization and, in urban areas, a focus on neighborhoods and individuals over bureaucracies and central planning.

In this light it was easy to view Robert Moses as cartoonishly evil, and Caro delivered, giving us an exciting villain origin story. The book traces Moses' career from his early days as an eager reformer through his heel-turn to corrupt boss who forces unwanted highways onto the city by the 1950s-60s.

There's truth to this of course, but an equally valid story could be that Moses was always an uncompromising idealist, in the mold of a Fiorello La Guardia, who never enriched himself (a fact Caro acknowledges) even as he steadily gained power. A problem with tidy narratives is that history ends up being written by whoever writes the best novel.

But the main problem with the Moses declension narrative is that it ignores the broader picture. For example, at the start of his career the "good" Moses (as the hosts say) constructed many beaches and pools. But during the interwar years bathing and swimming facilities were also gaining popularity nationwide and a dense city like New York expected and welcomed them. Similarly, the types of meandering parkways Moses built in the 1920s were en vogue and were already being built when he came to power. Later in his career, the "bad" Moses built many big and ugly expressways. Yes, Moses loved cars, but so did 1950s America, and federal policy was instrumental in guiding and enabling the types of highways he built.

The net effect is to assign Moses more power than he actually had. This comes up time and again in various ways.

###Highways

ROMAN MARS: Your district includes so many Robert Moses projects: the Triborough Bridge, the Bronx–Whitestone Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Cross Bronx Expressway… What is it like living in a district shaped by so many Moses productions?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: It’s like the opposite of entering houses of faith, where you’ll walk into this cathedral and every design decision is to make it feel liberatory and expansive and soaring. (Episode 4)

Here unpopular expressways are lumped in with widely admired projects from decades earlier. Any acknowledgement that the city ever needed or wanted highways disappears. All distinctions get flattened and highways are reduced to "bad."

For someone who so infamously ignored the public, it's surprisingly easy to see how public support affected Moses' power. By the mid-1950s as his highways grew larger and increasingly tore through dense neighborhoods (like the Cross Bronx) the public began to turn against him. Jane Jacobs famously won the fight against him in Greenwich Village in 1955. He never achieved his late-career plans for an interstate through midtown Manhattan or a new bridge over the Long Island Sound.

But back in the early decades of the automobile age, the public didn't object to highways in the same way. The most popular exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair was GM's [Futurama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_Fair\)), a model of a futuristic society featuring slick interstate-like highways and no mass transit. Rail was well-known and commonplace in cities, especially New York, which had just spent four decades building a world-class subway system. Besides, as The Power Broker vividly explains, despite its mass transit, pre-highway New York was a growing mess of traffic congestion.

The opening ceremony of the Triborough Bridge (1936) was attended by the president and by New Deal chief Harold Ickes. The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge (1939), completed early and under budget, was touted as an engineering marvel and displaced very few residents because of its place on the city's periphery.

Compare those to projects like the Throgs Neck Bridge (1961), which runs parallel to the Bronx-Whitestone and opened amid the protests of families displaced by the highway approach which cut through (now denser) Queens neighborhoods.

Looking back today, we wish there had been a mass transit czar with the powers of a Robert Moses. But presentism only confuses the issue. After all, rail projects displace families and are subject to the same power dynamics as highway projects. We use our present-day hatred of highways and anachronistically imagine people must always have been protesting highways per se, not just having their home torn down.

You can see this kind of odd confusion when Mars and Kalan discuss how Moses would create ready-made projects and then hold them over the heads of politicians who wanted a share of the credit. Moses was infamously stubborn and wouldn't brook the slightest change to his plans.

ELLIOTT KALAN: ...And at this point, it makes me glad that Robert Moses–this sounds strange–was so into roads and so into building things as opposed to any number of more terrible things that he might’ve been doing. (Episode 8)

It hopefully goes without saying that if Moses had been in charge of building toxic waste dumps politicians wouldn't have been lining up to attach their names to his projects! We may hate to hear it now, but people wanted credit for bridges, new highway exits, etc, in their neighborhoods because these were considered forms of public investment into a community's infrastructure. Moses was arrogant and stubborn and he undoubtedly influenced policy choices, but he didn't blackmail the city into having highways.

As public support eventually waned, this tactic stopped working. Even his biggest backers like the New York Times turned against him into the 1960s as the mainstream orthodoxy began to move away from big urban planning projects.

###Race

PETE BUTTIGIEG (FIELD TAPE): ...if an underpass...was designed too low for [a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids] to pass by, that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.

ROMAN MARS: And so, all The Power Broker heads in the world knew exactly what you were talking about when you said that. But many people–maybe some in good faith, maybe some in bad faith–were surprised or at least they feigned surprise in some way.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, certainly. I was taken aback by how controversial it was.... It was documented certainly in some of the anecdotes that emerge in The Power Broker–but also just known as something that happened not just in the South but in places from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Pittsburgh to Syracuse to places like Birmingham and Atlanta.

Some of the most damning claims in The Power Broker relate to Moses' attempts to segregate his pools and beaches. These claims get scrutinized from time to time, but it's idle debate. As Buttigieg accurately points out, these are mere anecdotes. Moses was unquestionably racist. Caro actually undersells Moses' racism, for example by leaving out prominent evidence like Moses' work to keep a civil rights amendment out of the New York state constitution.

That racism deserves to be part of the Moses legacy. It only becomes misleading when we look at his personal beliefs as something unique, something they unfortunately were not among 20th century government officials. La Guardia supported Japanese internment. He and other liberal reformers defended New York's early, whites-only public housing projects. Public pools in New York that predate Moses were segregated. Nationally pools, beaches, and housing were segregated. The New Deal-era state was very racist. None of this excuses Moses' actions. It merely puts in context how much he individually was responsible for the era's inequalities.

Overestimating his influence can make it tempting to associate him with injustices he was barely connected to. In conversation with AOC, they get into race and how it can affect city priorities.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: And it’s a similar thing actually in New York City with free public college tuition. Our CUNY system was free. It was free. You could go to college for free. It was after the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Movement, which forced integration of our public systems, that we started getting divestment from our public systems. And it’s really important that, I think, people understand that. This is not just government abandonment; this is a story about race.

This is a very important chapter in the city's history that continues to resonate today. But then she concludes,

...I think that we [could] still have a tuition-free public college system. And it’s not an accident that in the aftermath of Moses’ peak era, you see the emergence in New York City of the Young Lords and of the Black Panthers who are directly advocating for the infrastructure and investments and speaking to the inequities that he had just created. And I think that’s part of the story, right? Where his chapter ends, ours begins. (Episode 4)

Tuition at CUNY specifically was a key part of the budget-slashing program forced upon the city by a group of bankers and corporate executives at the height of the 1975 fiscal crisis. It was a signature part of the city's move away from public investments and toward a smaller, more privatized city. Moses, if he's connected to this episode at all, is representative of the earlier era.

We should not deny the inequities of mid-century urban renewal, but this would have been the perfect opportunity for the podcast to talk a little about the failures of post-Moses approaches to city governance, too. That can't happen when Moses is an all-powerful boogeyman.

###Urban Decay

MAJORA CARTER: ...Growing up here in the South Bronx and feeling the impact of just how disinvested we were not just economically. But I also feel like it was almost a spiritual disinvestment that many people from our communities experienced because, especially during the era I grew up in, there was a lot of abandoned buildings that had been burned out as a result of the fires and also lack of financial investment in them as well. (Episode 9)

Disinvestment in the Bronx, burned-out buildings. Finally we're going to get into the 1970s and 80s and draw some connections to the post-Moses era, right? Right?

Moses clearly had no regard for the individuals who lived in places like the South Bronx. But the 1950s Bronx was experiencing major changes before any highway forced people out. White families, like those from East Tremont portrayed in The Power Broker, weren't staying there long-term. They wanted to move up and out, send their kids to college and get a suburban home to signal middle-class success.

It's tempting to lay the blame for white flight and suburbanization solely on highways and urban renewal, but the roots are much deeper. Job loss, globalization, technological changes, federal programs that subsidized highways but not transit, segregation, redlining, differences in union protections between North and South (many of these things conscious policy choices), all brought on an urban crisis in America's postindustrial cities.

Give Moses his share of the blame. But as author and Bronx resident Marshall Berman put it, his highways didn't cause urban decay, they turned "long-range entropy into sudden, inexorable catastrophe." (Berman 325)

These major changes coincided with a new in-migration of Black Southerners and Puerto Ricans who, blocked from the suburbs, moved into places like the Bronx that whites had abandoned. Mid-century New York was a robust social democracy and a stronglhold of unionized labor. But into the 1970s, as city finances worsened and popular opinion turned against public spending, these increasingly nonwhite, "decaying" areas took the brunt of the city's austerity budget. In 1976 Roger Starr, the city's Housing and Development Administrator, advocated "planned shrinkage," suggesting the city should completely stop providing some neighborhoods with basic services like schools and firefighters.

Moses is an easy punching bag. But the laser-focus on him not only misses the bigger picture, it is a repetition of an argument for a shift away from government spending and central planning, an argument that has just as badly failed places like the Bronx.

###Community Control and the Fall of New York

ELLIOTT KALAN: ...It feels like one of the big flaws of Moses in the book is his impatience. He’s got to get it done. He’s got to get it done now so we can move on to the next thing. And when you’re building something that will last possibly 200 years or longer, the impatience in getting it built is only going to hurt you in the long run. (Episode 7)

In a city facing a major housing shortage that has taken many decades to complete a single new subway line, this attitude doesn't feel as repulsive to me as he seems to imply. (n.b. Moses' projects have largely held up. Contrast with something like the Tappan Zee Bridge.)

We know a lot about slowing down public projects because New York's post-Robert Moses shift toward austerity and privatization carried with it a related set of reforms for city planning. Gone were the City Planning Commission's "master plans", replaced in June 1974 with neighborhood-specific "minplans." The city's many small Community Boards were given more power as well, giving residents the power to block projects like public housing and to resist changes to the racial makeup of their neighborhoods.

"Much of the credit for the new approach goes to Jane Jacobs," wrote the Times architecture critic.

Slashed budgets gave rise in the 1970s and 80s to new "public-private partnerships" that took control of public services and spaces like Central Park. A boon perhaps for parks in wealthy areas, but a detriment to smaller, lesser-known public spaces across the city and a step away from democracy.

There's much (valid) concern over how Moses grew to be unaccountable and anti-democratic. But endless checks, balances and local vetos are equally so. Ironically, community control movements trace back to protests initiated among the city's Black communities in earlier decades, but by the 1970s local controls and land use regulations were used by white residents across the region to block minorities from their communities. Studies have proven this connection. As explained in the book Segregation by Design, an "accumulation of regulations reduces the supply of multifamily housing by allowing residents opposed to development to delay the process and file lawsuits." (Trounstine 35)

This was clear from the outset. New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin noted in 1975, "I have always thought that when one of the new tree-planting, block-party-holding, neighbor-meeting block associations is scratched deeply, what scratches back has some attributes of the old, exclusionary, property-crazed homeowners associations." (quoted in Anbinder 18)

An honest conversation about Moses weighs the unfairness of his unilateral power against the equally anti-democratic NIMBYism of localized restrictions and regulations.

Many have stood on the bus to LGA stuck in traffic wondering why better transit is too much to ask. Many have stared bleakly at highway on-ramp hellscapes that cut through residential neighborhoods down the street from their apartments. There aren't simple answers to the big questions Caro raises. But what do we accomplish by endlessly cursing the name of Robert Moses? If the The Power Broker is a cautionary tale, then the lesson has been well learned. We haven't had anything close to another Moses, thanks in no small part to this book. Clearly we don't want to carbon-copy the inequities of earlier eras, nor do we need a single person above all accountability. But a city that "impatiently" executes big public projects doesn't sound like such a bad place to be, and conversations that can't get past step 1 certainly don't get us any closer.

Sources

Jacob Anbinder. (March 2024) "Power to the Neighborhoods!": New York City Growth Politics, Neighborhood Liberalism, and the Origins of the Modern Housing Crisis. Meyer Fellowship Paper. Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (2008)

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982)

Martha Biondi, "Robert Moses, Race, and the Limits of an Activist State," Ballon and Jackson, p. 116.

Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (2000)

Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire (2012)

Owen D. Gutfreund, "Rebuilding New York in the Auto Age: Robert Moses and His Highways." Ballon and Jackson, p. 86.

Marta Gutman, "Equipping the Public Realm: Rethinking Robert Moses and Recreation." Ballon and Jackson, p. 72.

Kenneth T. Jackson, "Robert Moses and the Rise of New York: The Power Broker in Perspective." Ballon and Jackson, p. 67.

Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present (2007)

Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (2011)

Suleiman Osman. (2017) "We're Doing It Ourselves": The Unexpected Origins of New York City’s Public–private Parks during the 1970s Fiscal Crisis. Journal of Planning History, 16(2), 162-174.

Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017)

Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (2018)

Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, Laguardia, And The Making Of Modern New York (2013)

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

A little bit of background: I was gathering a compendium on West African mythological weapons for a personal project, and I was focused on two swords displayed a myriad of times on the famous Benin Bronzes, the Ada and Eben, but sadly there is little information on the two blades, after an eternity of researching and posting on the Historum African Forum I gathered a lacklustre amount of information on its origin and then I was urged to commit the ultimate taboo......... and that was to use Wikipedia for sources on African history, and to my expectations, it was so horrendous I assume it's by a guy who knows nothing about swords or someone who is neither of the Edo or Yoruba ethnic group, So I'll try clean it up, I will detail everything I picked up, here's the Wiki link by the way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_and_Abere

Background: This Wikipedia page is just rife with misinformation on West African swords, no coherence with sources whatsoever, and just straight confusing

Error Number One taken from the Introduction section: "State swords have been used for centuries to represent the ancient rights bestowed from Ife to various Yoruba, Yoruboid, and neighbouring groups, including the Fon, Ga, and Benin Kingdom". Great!

Slight Problem here is his source for this, (Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300) Suzanne Preston Blier says: "During coronations, individual Yoruba Kings would contact the Oranmiyan priest at Ife (Eredumi) to acquire a "sword of state" a tradition purportedly followed by the Edo, Fon, and Gan kings as well. Such a ritual in essence served to both promote and legitimize the use of these ^(long swords) throughout the broader area."

About that...... the Ada nor the Eben are longswords or Long swords or Long-swords (Poynor et. al 2024)

Take a look:

https://umma.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/69362_ca_object_representations_media_1334_original.jpg

And here is a long sword ( https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/27966 ):

https://www.theknightshop.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/364x364/f59d29ad4c22cdd1dd61568d41112f23/d/s/dsc_4459__15034_2.jpg

And no, the author has no reason to refer to the Ada or the Eben in this matter as long swords, there is no context in that section of the book where she would need to.

So whatever sword she was referring to was not the Ada or the Eben swords, though as you'll see later on, I'm sure the editor was referring to the Ada.

The next error is found in the "Àdá" section where he states: "The Ada took the forms of the Hwi and Gubasa which were mandatory among the Fon in the coronation of every ruler". This is FALSE his source for such a claim is "Sandra T Barnes Africa's Ogun, Second, Expanded Edition: Old World and New"

The editor conflates Amose's "Great Sword of Justice and the Fon Sword of Ogun" and then bizarrely conflates both for the Gubassa sword which he then conflates for an Ada blade then he conflates the Benin "Ada" for the Oyo Sword of Justice....... let me put this bluntly THEY ARE NOT THE SAME SWORD. You the reader are confused, aren't you?

Here is the source: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8OWjkR-1btMC&q=gubasa+sword+justice&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=gubasa%20sword%20justice&f=true

Let me break it down: Amos speaks about the symbolic meaning of the sword in the religion of the Fon people not A sword but swords so no particular sword was in the conversation initially,

So next was the Great Sword of Justice that Amos noted to being the same type as an Edo Ada mind you, NOT THE SAME SWORD but the same type of an "Ada" blade, for example

The Longsword Type XVIIIc

https://swordis.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Longsword-Type-XVIIIc.png

 Longsword Type XVa

https://swordis.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Longsword-Type-XVa.png

These are two different longswords, mind you they are the same "type" of a sword but are ultimately different whether it be in grip, ricasso or pommel, which leads to a separate categorization or development (Oakeshott, 1991). The same Idea falls for the "Ada" blade where there are different types of "Ada" one of them being the Sword of Justice referenced by Amos, but the Benin Ada is not the same Sword of Justice and has its separate origin predating the Ife Kingly title (I Joseph, 2014). This shows how the editor conflates blades under the "Ada" category of being the same sword under the Sword of Justice when they are all different. Amos and Poynor adhere to this idea and consistently refer to them as different "types" of swords, but not the same, so it is prevalent in academia.

Now the claim the Gubassa and Hwi are Ada blades is blatant misinformation, I'm not as well studied on the Hwi but I'm confident both blades are different, he claims the sword of Justice "Ada" the Fon King got from Ife was the Gubassa, which in Fon myth is directly from Gu (The Iron and fire God) and is NOT from Ife.

( https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/25-2/Benin.pdf )

So to Summarise this section of the debunk, There are many swords of the "Ada" type as pointed out by Amos, the Sword of Justice, Benin Ada and Ada Ogun, and many more I presume.

The Gubassa and Hwi are NOT ADA SWORDS, nor are they under that classification.

The next section of the debunk is the "Abẹ̀rẹ̀" where he states An Abere is a Yoruba word for a state sword said to be used by different tribes. Cyril Punch in his visit to the king of Benin in 1889, documented the use of a fan-like blade being twirled in the hands of chiefs during a ceremony. In his illustrations, he labelled and referred to the object as an “Ebere”. While his account contains the earliest known written name of the sword in the Benin kingdom, this type of object is more commonly known today as an “Eben” by the Edo people. A divergence in names for the same object is not a strange thing, as even across Yoruba dialects, the Owo people refer to their ceremonial fan blade as an “Ape”.

One thing you'll immediately notice is the lack of information in comparison to the "Ada" Section and it makes complete sense when you realise its unsourced assumption after assumption after assumption, No source to prove the linguistic change from Abere to Ebere from a Yoruba Linguist or a historian shows its already sketchy enough, It is no secret that the Eben Twirling Blade is unique to the Benin Kingdom, unlike the "Ada" types of blade prevalent throughout Yorubaland.

Many Yoruba Kingdoms indeed have the Eben blade, but those are Yoruba Kingdoms (Like Owo, Warri and Lagos) uniquely under domination by the late Benin Empire or within the EdoPeoples's sphere of influence, which due to the empire was quite dominant in eastern Yorubaland ( Akintoye, 1969), the citation here by Professor Akintoye is a well regarded academic on Yoruba History and wrote A History of the Yoruba People in 2010, and still conceded the fact that the Oval sword seen in Northwestern Yorubaland (Eben) is of Edo Origin (Akintoye, 1969).

Now the Pictures he used........ lmao not even those are accurate

One of the pictures is the Udamalore of the Owo Kingdom which is a form of an udà a blade that is distinct from an Àdá (Poynor, 2024).

Here is an Udamalore: https://mitp.silverchair-cdn.com/mitp/content_public/journal/afar/57/3/10.1162_afar_a_00775/3/m_afar_a_00775.figure.15.jpeg?Expires=1733553201&Signature=q5jiTinpZRXs7ldkM65p2ZKQZeMl0zlprXZULIq2WxBDQMG7s-xrWj6wNPyQBTLqqUHX4mrkqFmXMHTLj9luyacBqRxE9UuIdCaVv1lmV5eJwmhQagEtPWv2p1nTmgngQ0fG1vbCjtxaeFLBJqf9~AyjwlV5MC9-JDkRlWi6RPtjJkgwFb4UuSjKI2cPdA9t2RvO6YnzwORXOC-1KVBKlfHWKBVF8bJPJHNjZ7WT9PvD1SN~CvxtI~2SjNIcF6TUFxzP44wRR3XbMUJ6exNeDByToTMZ-ksDlGQTjbkg4VlVO0UpUanqg8ehOBUF4Q54Q7syum80a0kdZy0VC8YOgg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA

And here is an Uda: https://mitp.silverchair-cdn.com/mitp/content_public/journal/afar/57/3/10.1162_afar_a_00775/3/m_afar_a_00775.figure.14b.jpeg?Expires=1733553201&Signature=3CGKsCjuQecAtoD2h8jDu2c~7fvqaGdJX1PzwOXyqaQXJbGYayQ5FAMrLSQonjreArrqIHzJgmR~LxMl00FoF6EYXGE2OKS8sRNDf~vRcfLEkFMH~bk64H6RWexm8WQRU2PMF7Fv3GdhjdXGiB8oKBiWkrY1QbKClPI5cGql4ga0WhZvqMK9ZemmikmgfVhoHlUdnZgybN~R8n2nwIcUvqPfuv9MMy5pvHB6pqeDhUfIvpk14V6YcjKxXgUhTiTELzxdbeJk05J8BlI~QVFbr2mtFnmQ-Ldp-8Uz0zXPwUPHeX88MblP-Zc7MdAS1lVhTdsbdMwwDAoyr~G-IUH-ZQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA

Also an Ada-Ogun as he shows for some reason, can be any blade or sword as long as it's Ceremonially for Ogun. his source ( mentions sword(s) and not a single sword, another such case...... as well as the insane variety of an "Ada-Ogun"

A Dagger-like Ada-Ogun

https://emuseum.miami.edu/internal/media/dispatcher/8075/preview

A "Hwi but less bulbous" looking Ada-Ogun

https://emuseum.mfah.org/internal/media/dispatcher/286960/preview

The most "Ada-looking" Ada-Ogun

https://cdn.drouot.com/d/image/lot?size=fsquare&path=2331/143487/fcf1062d7264e0a4ef3ba35551298ebd

Those are just examples I've seen.

Next is the Archaeology section, where he states: Whether for ceremonial use, or conventional use, it is evident that swords across these cultures have taken on varied identities, and many early oral traditions point to Ife as a source of their royal authority. Archaeological discoveries of ancient sword carvings in rock have been found in Ife.

" And many early oral traditions point to Ife as a source of their royal authority"

Well no. Let's run the List shall we

Benin Ada and Eben - From the Ogiso (I. Joseph 2014)

Ada-Ogun - From Ogun (Witte, 1976)

Sword of Justice Ada - From Ife (Barnes, 1997)

Gubassa- From Gu ( https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/25-2/Benin.pdf )

Udamalore - From the Ancestors (Poynor, 2024)

And finally, you know one thing that's really funny that I didn't even realise while making this, NONE OF HIS SOURCES MENTION THE BLADES, absolutely none mention the Eben except dictionaries and only Johnson and Amos indirectly call out the Ada but not the Benin Ada blade lmao but a similar type. It was all a very terrible attempt and a reach by the editor to reach some kind of obvious conclusion that the eben originates from Ife, despite literally 0 scholars claiming so and even for an original Concept the research was soooooo badly put together and incoherent, and people will be believing it to since its on wiki lmaoooo. a straight up stain on West-african spathology.

References:

1. I Hold in My Hand … Prestige, Rank, and Power, Robin Poynor and Babatunde Onibode, 2024

2. Vol. 4(1), S/No 13, January, 2015:1-17 ISSN: 2225-8590 (Print) ISSN 2227-5452 (Online) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ijah.v4i1.1

3. Oakeshott, E. (1964). The sword in the age of chivalry. Boydell Press

4. Akintoye, S. A. The North-Eastern Yoruba Districts and the Benin Kingdom. Humanities Press, 1971.

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

Monthly post for all your debunk or debate requests. Top level comments need to be either a debunk request or start a discussion.

Please note that R2 still applies to debunk/debate comments and include:

• A summary of or preferably a link to the specific material you wish to have debated or debunked.
• An explanation of what you think is mistaken about this and why you would like a second opinion.

Do not request entire books, shows, or films to be debunked. Use specific examples (e.g. a chapter of a book, the armour design on a show) or your comment will be removed.

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

A man discovers he's a werewolf after getting burned touching a silver cake server, a woman struggles in silver shackles in the back of a van during the night of a full moon, someone being sedated with ketamine needs a dose of silver to suppress their natural drug immunity; a few vignettes (from Cursed (2005), The Last Werewolf (2011), and Moon Called (2006)) of how the 21st century werewolf has the expectation of some creative relationship with silver. And some will ask: why silver?

The Beast of Gévaudan, some will answer^[1] - a large, lupine beast slain in 1767 France with a silver bullet, having slaughtered dozens of peasants and fuelling harried whispers of a loup-garou - a werewolf.

No, some will say; that detail was invented in 1946. Blame Hollywood; blame The Wolf Man, released in 1941, for wholesale inventing what many now consider "folklore" - not just silver, but full moons, wolfsbane, and more.^[2]

No, still others will say; we have records before then, in the depths of European mythology, where silver was renowned for its anti-magical properties; a pure, holy, lunar metal, fit for slaying unholy vermin of the night.^[3]

Yet, somehow, all three are wrong - although the last group are the warmest.

I originally intended this to be a simple post, focusing on the examples of pre-Hollywood werewolves stopped with silver, but I sorta descended into madness trying to untangle all the claims and all I'm saying is that you should not scroll down to see how long this stupid post ended up being.

Welcome back. We'll start with 18th century France, specifically a historical region of the rural south: Gévaudan.

While animal attacks were far from unheard of at the time, la Bête du Gévaudan created a media firestorm eclipsing the nation's borders: a death toll said to reach the triple figures, heavy involvement of the state amassing an army of hunters, the drama of the King's hunter eventually presenting the stuffed corpse of "Le Loup de Chazes" after a year of strife - only for the killings to continue for two more years. However, the most important factor for why La Bête fuelled contemporary periodicals and fuels Youtube essays is its status being, as those Youtube essays are wont to say, a cryptid - an animal that ought to be a wolf, but is too large, too powerful, with numerous confused reports (or public hysteria) as to its exotic unwolfy appearance - a lion, or a hyena, escaped from a menagerie? Something unearthly, like un loup-garou?^[4]

Modern retellings have no problem connecting the events to werewolf superstitions, and also have no problem breathlessly retelling how it took a plucky local, not one of the King's men; and that Jean Chastel used a silver bullet, maybe one from melted holy silver. With this being the earliest use of a silver bullet to slay something lupine, and its legendary status, so it goes, this is what inspired the connection between werewolves and silver.

As many others are quick to point out, contemporary accounts imply he used, to quote Overly Sarcastic Productions:

perfectly normal bullets and a perfectly normal gun^[5]

The source of this misconception is always placed at the feet of writer Henri Pourrat, specifically his 1946 historical novel Histoire fidèle de la bête en Gévaudan; so it goes, unwitting readers took the "faithful story" part of the title literally, and Pourrat's creative detail - of Chastel using a silver bullet made from a blessed silver medal of the Virgin Mary he wore on his hat - become unerring fact, and that any connection to werewolves is a post-hoc connection made to give authenticity to a Hollywood invention.

Problem is, while Chastel did not use silver bullets, and Pourrat did indeed include his silver bullet detail, he is not the source of this error; it takes shape at the time of La Bête, with at least one contemporaneous account of attempts to shoot the beast with bullets of iron, lead, and silver - but to no avail.^[6] Élie Berthet's historical novel from 1867 has the beast being blooded after being shot with a silver coin, Andrew Lang's 1896 effort does similar with a silver bullet, and by 1921 the connection has already been made that a silver shot was the one that killed.^[7] The religious connection to blessings appears in Pierre Pourcher's 1889 non-fictional account - although the telling is somewhat exaggerated, with the Abbot's religious conviction melting off the page, considering the beast a divine punishment; as well as his personal connection, almost deifying Chastel in writing about his memories of talking to Chastel as a child.^[8] So, the novel inclusion of Chastel blessing his bullets, and La Bête letting him calmly finish the litanies of the Holy Virgin before closing his book and shooting are...suspect, if I am permitted to guess. Not suspect enough for Abel Chevalley, who included them almost word-for-word in his own historical novel published in 1936. It's at this point it's clear how popular the legend is - these are far, far from the only histories or historical novels, though they are some of the most popular.

Contemporaneous connections were also made to werewolves,^[9] with details of what was considered a peasant superstition making their way into historical novels. It is possible that these separate ideas, of blessed silver bullets and werewolves, at least partially inspired a scene in Guy Endore's 1933 bestselling novel The Werewolf of Paris, where the local warden (garde champêtre) is at his wit's end after a spate of wolf attacks on the local's livestock, putting the finishing touches on a bullet:

“Try and escape this,” Bramond smirked. “A silver bullet, blessed by the archbishop, melted down from a holy crucifix. Beelzebub himself would fall before this.”

By the time Henri Pourrat would publish his Histoire fidèle in 1946, the connection between La Bête, holy silver, and werewolves, was hardly new, and it certainly predated The Wolf Man's 1941 release date.

"But," you might say, "I saw Lon Chaney Jr. get beaten to death with a silver-tipped cane in 1941, not shot with a bullet!". And so it goes, Curt Siodmak didn't just write silver into the script of The Wolf Man, he wrote everything - moons, wolfsbane, infectious bites, all we think is werewolf folklore came from Siodmak's pen! Sure, maybe he wasn't the first person in history to come up with the idea - but an evolving fiction about one detail of one single event hundreds of years ago, one that primarily enraptured France and not the American west of Hollywood, can hardly be said to be the source of Siodmak's concept. True - well, not the single-handedly inventing werewolf folklore thing, he simply canonised that which already existed; but we can't use La Bête as a singular origin. Maybe we can say the French got it first, but the Siodmak got it popular?

Brian J. Frost's wonderfully nerdy Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature exhaustively covers, among other things, the pulp fiction of early 20th century magazines like Weird Tales, where silver was commonplace. Blood Flower has Jules de Grandin already mocking the idea of silver bullets in 1927:

“And wasn’t there some old legend to the effect that a werewolf could only be killed with a silver bullet?” “Ah bah,” he replied with a laugh. “What did those old legend-mongers know of the power of modem firearms? Parbleu, had the good St. George possessed a military rifle of today, he might have slain the dragon without approaching nearer than a mile!"^[10]

An interesting - but unrelated - detail is how the werewolf's body is treated, with:

a stake of ash through his heart to hold him to the earth.

Anyway, there's several more times where silver turns up: Jeremy Ellis's Silver Bullets (1930), Alfred H. Bill’s novel Wolf in the Garden (1931), Paul Selonke's Beast of the Island (1940) has someone doing...this:

and all at once I found myself believing in werewolves. In sudden terror, I knew that lead could not end this beast’s existence. It had to be a silver bullet through its vile heart!

[...]In desperation, she had ripped the tiny cross from her neck, raising it in front of her.

A silver crucifix! I snatched the tiny cross from her trembling fingers and rammed it down the barrel of my revolver, swinging the gun up again as the beast launched its shaggy bulk straight at my throat.

I saw the unholy leer of those hellish eyes. White, dripping fangs gleamed against the blood-red of the brute’s huge jaws, I aimed for the heart this time, and the beast was almost upon me when I fired. The discharge stopped the brute in mid-air. It twisted backward, thumping heavily to the ground.^[11]

While these are all silver bullets/things-that-came-out-of-a-gun, Ralph Allen Lang's The Silver Knife (1932), after using lead bullets to no effect, has the lycanthropic medicine man stabbed with a silver spoon. Or it would if Lang wasn't a coward. A detail - that sometimes gets left out - is that Siodmak only includes silver bullets in one of The Wolf Man's many sequels, House of Frankenstein (1944); this gives us time to include Jane Rice's The Refugee (1943), where...oh, for goodness' sake:

“Do you like that?” Milli whispered. For a reply, Lupus opened his mouth and yawned. And into it Milli dropped a chocolate, while at the same instant she jabbed him savagely with a hairpin. The boy sucked in his breath with a pained howl, and a full eight minutes before the sun went down, Lupus had neatly choked to death on a chocolate whose liqueur-filled insides contained a silver bullet

[...]It was marvelous that she’d happened to pick up “The Werewolf of Paris” yesterday—had given her an insight, so to speak^[12]

She eats his dead body after this (gotta get the chocolate back), for what it's worth - which makes this a delightful reference to The Werewolf of Paris.

Speaking of The Werewolf of Paris, it's hard to say that Siodmak wasn't basing his mythology on previous elements, when this book - unrelated in any direct way to The Beast of Gévaudan, published in English by an American to wild acclaim - was kicking around. It's even harder to say that Siodmak individually came up with the idea when you learn that Guy Endore, the author, published it in 1933, and was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to - like Siodmak - write scripts for horror films. Universal Pictures responded in 1935 by quickly releasing The Werewolf of London, a title which does, in hindsight, seem awfully suspicious. Underperforming at the box office, Universal would try the werewolf thing again in 1941 and hit gold with The Wolf Man; The Werewolf of Paris would only get a film adaption in 1961, with Hammer Film Productions' The Curse of the Werewolf, which sets the story in Spain (purely because they had an unused Spanish-themed movie set!). Also in 1933 was the first airing of The Lone Ranger - an American radio play (and eventually successful television show) which prominently features silver bullets; while this has nothing to do with werewolves, the point is that the concept was swirling throughout America by the time Siodmak used it.

Despite this, so far Team Wolf Man is winning if we shift some of the pieces around; The Beast of Gévaudan wasn't, after all, killed with a holy silver bullet, and surely we can just say that the concept bubbled up organically in the 20th century until it exploded into the mainstream with The Wolf Man? Because, as the main thrust of the argument goes, it's a Hollywood invention - as it does not appear in folklore. At all.

To be blunt, this is a truly, truly bizarre claim to make.

The two most popular works on werewolves, Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) and Montague Summers' The Werewolf (1933), make reference to silver buttons and coins being used to shoot at shapeshifting witches, but no mention of their use against werewolves, no other usage of silver, and no explicit mention of silver bullets. For your typical content creator, this is definitive proof that silver and werewolves do not mix in folklore.

This is an issue I could write a passionate and very long post about (for reference the current post is merely "long-ish", in British Imperial units), but to be brief, I'll paraphrase the philosophers: werewolf history consists of a series of footnotes to Baring-Gould. His seminal work was the first English-language book on the topic, and did a good enough job covering as much as possible that he essentially cemented how people approach werewolves - he defines what people talk about, but also what they don't. What's of significance to us, is that in 1865, the fledging field of folklore studies had only generated so much, and crucially - Baring-Gould's native Britain doesn't have any werewolf folklore. What had been written on werewolves wasn't written in English, or easily accessible in Victorian Britain. Montague Summers makes a valiant attempt to pull together a wider array of sources from a wider array of languages, but he is infamously messy and unfocused, caring more about his belief in the devil (and his belief that werewolves and vampires are real) plus mythology than scraps of folklore.

When people write about werewolves, they write about what Baring-Gould wrote about, with a smattering of Summers if they're feeling particularly studious; when people read about werewolves, they read what those people wrote. When people learn about werewolves, by and large, they learn a history that is almost completely devoid of the extensive work folklorists have done over the past two hundred years - but this absence is invisible, so the vast majority of people producing content on werewolves believe that what they read and write is representative of oral werewolf legends. We get people making bold, sweeping claims; not just on silver bullets, but everything related to werewolves. That's not to say modern texts are easily accessible; the language barrier persists, offline archives or paywalls are the norm, and you're reliant on researchers publishing for your niche, giving us an almost random representation of regional legends - the existence of a book dedicated to werewolves can say as much about a person's random desire to collect werewolf legends as much as it says about the frequency of said legends in their locale; ditto for a lack of records.

Let's talk silver!

Predating the folklore enthusiasm of the 19th century are three poems; in 1775 we have Johann Heinrich Voß' first poem, Der Wehrwolf,^[13] a short dialogue between two people: the first is scared of the werewolf, and the second reassures them and says the werewolf is merely a nerd who "scribbles book reviews" (der Bücherurtheil sudelt), and can be "de-wolfed" (entwolft) with a silver bullet. The double-barrelled-double-barrelled Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg's Der Wehrwolf from 1783^[14] includes many concepts that reoccur: inherited silver, marked with a cross; the wounded werewolf (in this case an old women wrapped in a wolf skin) escaping to her home, and her condition being betrayed by her wounds. Interestingly, the ammunition here is an arrow! Voß' second poem, Junker Kord from 1793^[15] is a rather sarcastic piece about a wealthy hunter and his son, Junker Kord; the hunter boasting of his exploits, like killing a fox not with a gun but with a thundercrack of his whip, and shooting a bullet of inherited silver into a werewolf - that in the next line is a bleeding old woman in rags.

The earliest recorded folklore I can find is from 1830, from a travelogue by Christian Hieronymos Justus von Schlegel,^[16] recording an Estonian story where fearless man-eating wolves are confronted by a hunter with, after the failure of ordinary bullets, silver:

claiming that the latter could be used to shoot the Devil himself.

The death of a "wolf with two black spots on its breast" leads to it being skinned, revealing:

a dead woman who had transformed herself into a wolf with the help of witchcraft (durch Teufelkünste).

Several more relevant legends are recorded the same century; probably the most well known is The Werewolves in Greifswald, having been published online and translated into English alongside three other German records,^[17] making it easily accessible for the lore-hungry werewolf enthusiast:

Two hundred years ago for a time there was a frightfully large number of werewolves in the city of Greifswald. They were especially prevelant in Rokover Street. From there they attacked anyone who appeared outside of their houses after eight o'clock in the evening. At that time there were a lot of venturesome students in Greifswald. They banded together and one night set forth against the monsters. At first they were powerless against them, until finally the students brought together all of the silver buttons that they had inherited, and with these they killed the werewolves.

Originally published in 1840, we see here again inherited silver - and also silver buttons. We'll be seeing a lot of these. The three others are The Werewolf of Klein-Krams (1879; inherited silver, a wounded werewolf escape, and discovery - from a tail sticking out from under the bed's covers!), The Werewolf of Jarnitz (1903, inherited silver), and The Werewolf of Hüsby, attributed to 1921 but attested to 1845 by Wilhelm Hertz,^[18] where after being shot with a silver bullet:

From that time to the end of her life the woman had an open wound that no doctor could heal.

A Danish story from 1844^[19] has - after a tale of a man turning into a bear to attack his wife because he felt like it - a marauding "bear" turning out to be a werewolf after skinning, revealing a belt underneath; most of the already mentioned tales have the werewolf transform by putting on a belt and the importance of the werewolf's skin, showing the consistency of motifs in the region explored so far - the Northern edge of Germany, and the southern edges of Scandinavia. In contrast, another Estonian tale, courtesy of Wilhelm Hertz writing in 1862,^[20] displays a motif very common in the Eastern fringes of Europe: a wedding party being transformed into wolves as a punishment, and here with fur that can only be pierced by bullets with silver crosses (nut Kugeln mit silbernen Kreuzen konnten ihren Pelz durchbohren). To round things out, we have an 1894 French-language telling^[21] about a village in Luxembourg that mushes together 3 separate episodes; a boy steals a book that lets him become a werewolf; he tells a maid to throw her apron over the head of any werewolves she meets, then gets caught with the apron in his mouth at the dinner table so his mom confiscates the book and he remains a werewolf (the apron/thread in teeth motif is another very common one!); and finally, a baron sees him in a tree, doesn't exactly think to ask what a wolf is doing up a tree, fires blessed silver bullet after a regular one fails, finds a man falling instead of a monster, is apparently surprised that there was not in fact a large wolf sitting in a tree.

Aside from pointing excitedly at the appearance of blessed silver many decades before Henri Pourrat's much-maligned novel did the same, we can point out something else these stories have in common: the werewolf often survives! Instead, the silver bullet injures them, where the important point is revealing the hapless lycanthrope. Pēteris Šmits' Latviešu tautas ticējumi (Latvian folk beliefs) (1941)^[22], aside from giving us a silver bullet reference from 1832, quotes a newspaper from 1871 saying that werewolves (vilkaci) cannot be killed - but can be knocked down by bullets of silver and, in a rare appearance, gold; the werewolf can be forced human by simply lifting up the clothes the werewolf discarded. Gold bullets are also referenced in Alexander Dumas' (yes, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers Alexander Dumas) Le Meneur de loups (The Wolf Leader) from 1857^[23], where a combination of cross marks and gold or silver are needed for your bullet to take down a lycanthropic devil.

In contrast, Pēteris Šmits' Latviešu pasakas un teikas (Latvian fairy tales and fables) (1937)^[24] includes a tale of a wolf giving a human scream after being shot with silver, and finding out the neighbour's landlord had died; and firing a bullet from melted silver brooches only to find they'd shot the neighbour's wife. I did not find one of the neighbour being shot.

This is all before The Wolf Man appears on the silver screen; finishing our survey by including Ella Odstedt's Varulven i svensk folktradition (The werewolf in Swedish folklore),^[25] an entire book on werewolves brimming with silver bullets (silverkulor) published just 2 years after The Wolf Man, and vaguely gesturing at ISEBEL,^[26] an online search engine of folk tales from Netherlands, Denmark and North-East Germany, we can see a pattern emerging: the silver bullet motif appears in Germanic lands centred around the northern coasts of Germany; add in a single reference of silver coins used on the devil in wolf's form from Lithuania^[27], and a typical human-under-wolf-skin telling from Finland,^[28] we get a smattering all across the Baltics as well. I think it's fair to say that silver bullets do, in fact, appear in the folklore of werewolves.

For those who remember the yesteryear times of the start of this post, you'll remember I mentioned three positions: the Gévaudan enjoyers, the Wolf Man fans, and the Mythology lovers. The last lot seem pretty dang vindicated at this point; silver bullets and werewolves were clearly in folklore before the first two, so why did I say they were wrong?

Because, unfortunately, the position isn't simply that silver bullets come from folklore. No. No, that'd be too easy. Much like how the first two needed some semblance of an argument to push their position, it's often not enough to simply say "folklore, yeah?", especially when, as I complained about, most people don't have any examples of relevant folklore. Instead, they do what causes anyone in the humanities to sigh: they rationalise it. They explain it using common sense - making up a conclusion that "sounds right" or "makes sense" based on their (usually incorrect) beliefs on the subject, rather than drawing conclusions from data.

And so, you get many answers to the question of "why silver?": the moon, divine power, untarnished purity, anti-microbial activity. And sure, I could try to attack those points, but those are secondary; the common explanation is that these are the reasons why silver was believed to have magical properties. There's something subtle there: it's not "what was the role of silver in folk belief", it's "why does silver have this role",^[29] because, as we all know, that's what silver be; it's a common ailment for all your supernatural needs in modern fiction, silver charms heal, it's the holy metal, it relates to the power of the moon - the moon - and is a Big Deal in alchemy. Silver Has Mystic Powers, as TVTropes says.^[30] A significant enough Symbolic Role to earn a dedicated section of that name on the silver Wikipedia page. "Silver had a magic significance in folk tradition";^[31] so sayeth Katharine Mary Briggs, President of the Folklore Society - one of the oldest and largest of its kind - for three years, with one of the society's two awards named after her, who also literally wrote the book on Fairies. Because as everyone knows, silver is magical, right?

Right?

In case you were wondering, it was when these gears started turning that I started going somewhat insane.

First of all, here's a random observation. Take the full context of the above Briggs quote, from 1959:

Silver had a magic significance in folk tradition. Silver bullets and silver knives are efficacious against witches, who are in that respect different from fairies, whose traffic is in silver. Perhaps the silver with which a fortune-teller's hand must be crossed is meant to show that she gets her foresight from the fairies not from the devil.

Here's a quote from The Wolf Man, 1941:

A werewolf can be killed only with a silver bullet, or a silver knife or a stick with a silver handle. (spoken by a fortune teller)

The only other reference to silver knives being used as a magic weapon I can find (including plundering folklore) is the not-a-silver-spoon story I mentioned in the pulp fiction section.

Anyway, let's look at the role silver has in folklore. Silver bullets for werewolves, obviously. What else?

There's several involving coins; gifting a silver coin to a new-born^[32] - sometimes literally:

when given as money, would magically ensure wealth in the future. The coin must be put into the child's own hand, and if possible he must be made to close his fingers over it^[33]

Turning a silver coin in your pocket upon first seeing the new moon for luck and wealth,^[34] a bride putting a silver coin in one of her shoes,^[35] often following the rules of a rhyme:

"Something old, something new, Something borrowed, something blue, And a bit of silver in the heel of her shoe.^[36]

Maybe no matter how much you churn, you aren't creating any butter; witchcraft, obviously. Thrown a coin in!^[37] Many things get buried under the foundations of a house for good luck, silver coins among them. Sick animal? In Scotland, put a coin in a bowl of water, throw the water onto the animal, and ideally the coin sticks to the bottom of the bowl, for good luck.^[38] And "wealth", if you're the one called out to help:

I can personally testify that when silver is put into a bowl of water to work a spell, the wise woman keeps the silver.^[39]

None of these are massively widespread; not some Europe-wide common tradition. Not old, either - silver for babies is apparently a relatively new addition to the older gifts of...salt; a silver coin seems to be a somewhat newer addition also to the bridal rhyme.

And, of course: silver bullets. The difference however is stark - while for the previous uses you can certainly find examples - some more than others - silver bullets seem to have a far more robust tradition. The earliest reference I can find is from 1678,^[40] mentioned during testimony as part of Titus Oates' "Popish Plot", where he claimed a whole bunch of bollocks that got several people killed; think witch trials, but for Catholics. One of Oates' claims was that the King was planned to be assassinated - with silver bullets, held in the mouth of the assassin, supposedly because biting the bullets to roughen them up makes curing the wound harder. In 1683 a military manual^[41] makes reference to the belief that silver is good against those who are impervious due to "some black art or other"; the belief that silver bullets were good against magic-users is clearly rather old. In general, their stated use is against witches^[42] and other nefarious sorcerers,^[43] legendary accounts of historical figures like Charles XII of Sweden^[44] or Scotland's General Mackay,^[45] as far east as against the Cossack charakternik;^[46] it's most common to see it used for witches that have the shape of hares,^[47] and sometimes other animals like geese,^[48] otters,^[49] and this one time an enchanted whale swallows a guy's wife so he shoots it with a silver bullet.^[50] Legends of shapeshifting witches see some similarities to those of werewolves, like inherited silver, catching the injured witch after they run off as a hare, and in general appear more widespread - which makes sense (pardon my French) given the rarity of sighting wolves vs hares and mischievous waterfowl.

Generally, these silver bullets are mangled silver coins or torn off coat buttons - actually melting silver down to create a proper bullet is rare, or indeed is any mention that silver itself has magical powers. As a certain P. W. F. Brown puts it in a letter from 1961:

Dr Gardiner's interesting query in the September 1960 issue of Folklore concerning the use of silver bullets to destroy witches raises a question other than the age of the practice — whether, indeed, silver as a metal has magical powers in the same way as iron.

Of some forty references to silver and magic of sorts published in the Folk-Lore Society's periodicals since 1878, only one (Folklore, Vol. 68 1957, pp. 413-14) suggests that silver as a metal has any magical powers. All the other references make it clear that by the word 'silver' a silver coin is meant. The 'bullets' used against witches, for instance, are made from pieces of a silver coin cut up and substituted for lead pellets, though the use of a silver button with a cross marked on it is occasionally mentioned.^[51]

Perhaps appearing pedantic on the surface, it's an important point about all the silver so far: it's almost always coins. The use of coins as a draw for wealth is obvious, and for luck is but a step away; bullets against magical beings is the only consistent example of anything other than coins - usually buttons, but as we've seen, things like brooches or whatever you have on hand will do in a pinch. Brown continues:

It may be said that coins were used for charms because they were until recently the easiest form of silver available. I am not convinced by this argument because there seems to be no parallel superstition about silver, as there is about iron. Common objects made of iron, such as horseshoes, pokers, or flat-irons, have magical attributes, but it is clear from the many recorded iron-superstitions that it is the metal itself that is magical rather than the objects made from it.

While I believe Brown errs here (we've seen our share of buttons!), the sentiment is broadly correct: when something is magical in folklore, it is made abundantly clear! The iron example is a good one; as everyone knows, iron is a powerful charm against magic. Right?

Right?

Just kidding, the accounts for this are so overwhelming as to make the lack of associations for silver embarrassing in comparison. A variety of iron objects can be used to ward off evil; an iron nail in the pocket,^[52] horseshoes and iron plates nailed to doors,^[53] or iron left under the mat,^[54] or hell an iron anchor buried underneath the foundation.^[55] "Cold Iron" as a phrase wards against bad utterances, alongside physically touching the nearest piece of iron much the way we "touch wood".^[56] An iron poker is a must have, and iron tongs ward a baby from fairies and potential changelings;^[57] to stop a person's death from entering food, a small piece of iron must be stuck in them (the food).^[58] While silver was reserved to coins, iron's counter-spell for your churn comes in a variety of objects, poker, wedge, horseshoe - as long as it's iron.^[59] Any of these will have examples with a variety of objects, with the one thing in common being their material; even scrap iron would do!^[60]

Compare to actual magical objects made of silver: sure, it's easy to find silver rings for healing,^[61] silver brooches^[62] and silver amulets^[63] as talismans, but there's little to suggest the silver itself is of primary relevance - how the silver is used is more important; in shape, holding an inscription, being a mere mount for some efficacious item like amber, horn or gem; or even just the fact of being jewellery and the cultural context such items exist in. We can look at charms against the evil eye as an example: yes, silver gets used, but so do beads, thread, indigo;^[64] the idea being to catch someone's eye to dispel the magic before they look at you. Focusing on the usage of silver would ignore the explicit relevance of cornicello - horns; cattle horns are set in silver, or silver is shaped into horns, or even just the hand gesture of horns.^[65] Here, the significance of horn symbolism is made clear in a way that I cannot find for silver in any usage.

We can also compare silver bullets - which have no claim to being magical - to the German freikugeln (free bullets) of the Freischütz (free shooter); the creation reminiscent of black magic - taking place on a holy day, using materials stolen from a church, perhaps at a crossroads or deep in the forest, selling your soul to the devil in return for the bullets that always hit their target - no matter where you're aiming; sometimes the last one is in the devil's hands, turning back on the shooter.^[66] Hey presto, those bullets are definitely magic!

To round things out, we can have a cursory look at mentions of silver in Stith Thompson's index of motifs in folklore; plenty of instances where silver is used because of its brilliance and association with other precious substances (e.g. F821.3 Dress with gold, silver, and diamond bells), or the fantastical imagery of something being made of silver (e.g. F811.1.2 Silver tree), but the only instances where the silver itself presumes any magical relevancy is as silver bullets; it's easy to see why A Dictionary of English Folklore states:

It is not clear how much intrinsic power ascribed to the metal itself—some, no doubt [...] However, silver objects were not regularly thought powerful in the way that domestic iron objects were.

Well, fine. It's not silver bullets because silver is magical; it's silver bullets because silver bullets. Why?

The claims given for why silver is supposedly magical could easily be transferred directly to bullets - but fortunately for us, at this point, it requires very little effort to show why they're invalid.

Some claim it's because silver was seen as holy, pure, and relate it to a rationalisation of silver's antimicrobial properties. I already made a post on why those claims are nonsense. In short: silver wasn't holy, it got favoured for holy uses because shiny wealth, much the same way an inscribed ring is magical because of the inscription, and not the material. And there was no folk wisdom as to its antimicrobial preservative properties.

Some claim connection to the moon; maybe alchemical, mythical, or otherwise. But as we've seen, there's no connection made in folklore between silver and the moon - the one example was turning coins in your pocket at the new moon; for wealth, because they're coins, not because they're silver. The moon obviously has lots of beliefs surrounding it - cyclic fertility legends, the effects of moonlight, the man on the moon - but no silver. Werewolves also have little consistent relevance to the moon in folklore, with the only notable mentions being Slavic consumption of the moon (and sun!), and southern Italian relations to both the new and full moon;^[67] unfortunately, the isolated lupo mannaro is more psychological demonic possession than lupine shapeshifting.

Others still will make a rather funny connection to vampires, often relating this to the silver backing of mirrors and vampires' frosty relationship with their reflection. Not only was the lack of reflection a Bram Stoker invention; likely based off of the belief that upon a person's death, reflective surfaces - mirrors and standing water - must be covered to avoid a reflection of the soul;^[68] but any vampiric connection to silver only appears in 20th century pop culture - so you get people inventing folklore (mirrors) and then inventing reasons for its existence (silver). It is the vampires that get silver from werewolves, not the other way around.

So then, we haven't actually answered the question: why silver bullets?

To be fair, the answer's already been given, recorded many times by folklorists and mentioned several times already: it's not that silver is magical, it's that magical beings are impervious to bullets - regular bullets, of lead and iron. Metals have a hierarchy, gold at the top, silver below it, iron below silver. If someone is able to stop iron, you move up a rung. This is made clear with several mentions of people trying lead, iron, then silver, to no avail; with silver acting as a regular bullet instead of some monster-exploding pill; with the general focus on people being immune to lead and iron, and no equal focus on people being weak specifically to silver. If you're using a silver bullet, it may even be because they were born with a caul,^[69] or maybe wearing an amulet, both making them immune to lead and iron.^[70] But not because you hold onto a silver bullet in your witch-hunting kit, instead you're desperately ripping off your buttons or searching through your coins to find something bullet-sized not made of lead or iron.

Silver shiny.

The metallic hierarchy makes silver the glittering, poetic choice, and thanks to the proliferation of silver coins (and some buttons) - while still being precious enough to make for a special story - it's easily relatable; you can imagine that needing to cast silver bullets would make any potential tales more clunky and less spontaneous.

I do have a vague suspicion about where this "silver is used for werewolves because it's pure/holy/lunar" hypothesis came from: before the late 20th century I can't find any relevant hint of this connection - including non-alchemical interest in silver being a "lunar metal", save a single 1915 mention;^[71] but it is curiously similar to Wiccan/neo-pagan beliefs, which consider silver inherently magical and lunar, as well as feminine.^[72]

Finally, I'll leave with three unrelated thoughts.

Firstly, I am a moron with internet access; it is entirely likely what I could scrounge together and cram through google translate isn't remotely representative of European folk beliefs surrounding silver. I can only offer what I found, not what I missed.

Secondly, the slapdash nature of folklore records, and the beginning of their study only two hundred years ago, should be understood as being vaguely indicative of the oral legends they're attempting to catalogue, rather than an authoritative census of all we believe.

Thirdly, you know how protagonists in modern werewolf media often find themselves melting down gran's fancy cutlery to cast silver bullets? Turns out, metallurgy and ballistics are a pain in the arse, and creating silver bullets worth a damn is tricky business. There's a classic series of posts by Patricia Briggs - author of the Mercy Thompson series - trying her hand to prove that it wasn't unrealistic for her protagonist to whip up some werewolf chow:

Since it's nice to have the books make sense, I figured I'd just go build some silver bullets and silence the critics -- after all, how hard can it be? The Lone Ranger did it, right?

Give it a read!

https://www.patriciabriggs.com/articles/silver/silverbullets.shtml

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

In my previous post on silver, I came across a list of historical claims in a medical journal, and a curious one relating silver cutlery, blue-bloods, and plague prevention, caught my eye - ending up with that post. Since then, it's been nagging me - are any of the historical claims around silver true? Is the whole idea a load of bullshit?

Before we get into the general history, let's briefly recap the medical history: heavy metals present an antimicrobial effect, even in vanishingly small concentrations. After this effect was discovered in the 19th century alongside strides in understanding infection, silver saw use in eye drops, wound dressings, and water treatment.

The medical world largely replaced silver with antibiotics in the 20th century, and the modern re-appraisal of silver is usually done through this lens - rediscovering lost wisdom, with varying levels of disdain for non-natural antibiotics. In this perspective, the older the lost wisdom, the better the story: rediscovering Victorian medicine is cool, but what of ancient Greek wisdom?

Now, we're going to be more specific, because silver has for sure been used medically in general terms, even if its prevalence is oversold - seemingly every material gets a good whack! But within the context of antibiotics, the claim is that it has a long history of disinfecting or generally preserving food and water; say, silver tableware or jugs. The original paper that sparked this, Silver bullets: A new lustre on an old antimicrobial agent,^[1] tells us:

Prior to the 21st century, silver was utilized for its antimicrobial properties in mainly domesticated forms such as needles, vessels, plates, cutleries, and even crude silver fillings

Though as discussed in my previous post, this gets its history from History of the Medical Use of Silver^[2] by J. W. Alexander. We'll get back to this paper.

As it turns out, beliefs around this subject are rather widespread, rather than being the product of a single slapdash doctor trying his hand at history. In the academic world, this history is used to spruce up papers from doctors in a variety of journals, whether it's burns, wound care, or nanoparticles; outside academia, it gains the attraction of everyone - from alternative medicine proponents, preppers, and silverbugs, to folklore enthusiasts, collectors, and homesteaders. Instead of focusing on one instance of claims, I'm going to just do...all of them, I guess?

We often start with an account from Herodotus, on a certain Persian king only drinking water that's been boiled and stored in silver containers on his campaigns. We're also often told that in 335BC, Aristotle advised Alexander the Great to boil water and store it in silver containers on his campaigns.^[3][4] Or both did.^[5] Wait, what?

Many will state that the Greeks^[6] (or the Romans^[7] (or the Phoenicians^[8] (or all three plus the Egyptians^[2] ))) stored water in silver vessels to keep it fresh. Or wine. Or vinegar. Or milk. Or maybe it was the Mexicans?^[9]

The citations for this - if they give any, as an uncomfortable amount of medical papers don't - generally link back to J. W. Alexander's paper noted above, or Silver in medicine: A brief history BC 335 to present^[3] by Barillo and Marx, from 2009 and 2014, respectively.

J. W. Alexander is ass at citing; sections will be given citations that do not support the section, or are not cited at all. As far as I can tell, the only relevant citation for our history section is Disinfection, Sterilization and Preservation, published in 1968, which can only say:

Silver eating and drinking utensils have been used for centuries. Silver and silver compounds have been used for the treatment of drinking water and foodstuffs with no evidence of undesirable consequences^[10]

...except this is in the context of the book very dryly and exhaustively covering research from the 19th and 20th centuries; in short, J. W Alexander has zero relevant citations for his history. In a paper about history. Thanks, Doc.

Barillo and Marx offer several citations, except all are also junk but one from 1994,^[11] by Russel and Hugo. This cites a textbook - also by Hugo - Principles and Practice of Disinfection, Preservation and Sterilization,^[12] first published in 1982. What's interesting is that the 1994 paper uses Alexander the Great, but the textbook uses both Alexander and Cyrus!

Oh, it also doesn't cite anything.

The 1994 paper is the earliest example I can find of tying this story to Alexander the Great; the textbook only mentions boiling of water for Alexander, not silver. I'm presuming this was added when writing the paper, after uncovering some rare Aristotelian texts unknown to history. This version is obviously a corruption of Herodotus' account of Cyrus the Great:

Now when the Great King campaigns, he marches well provided with food and flocks from home; and water from the Choaspes river that flows past Susa is carried with him, the only river from which the king will drink. This water of the Choaspes is boiled, and very many four-wheeled wagons drawn by mules carry it in silver vessels, following the king wherever he goes at any time.^[13]

The earliest examples I can find for believing this was general practice is from 1958, in...Dairy Engineering, volume 75:^[14]

In ancient times copper and silver vessels were used for carrying and storing water because it remained sweeter in them than in other utensils.

This itself may be a corruption of a section from Athenaeus of Naucratis's Deipnosophistae, which relates Herodotus' claim, adding:

Ctesias of Cnidus also says that this royal water is boiled, stored in jars, and brought to the king and adds that it is the purest and sweetest water.^[15]

Either way, the only source any of this comes back to is a single line from Herodotus - who, if you didn't realise, didn't make any claim as to the purpose of the silver. No one else in antiquity says anything relevant about silver.

We could stop there. We really, really could.

However, our case against this isn't as strong as it could be: the Greeks and Romans did, after all, make use of silver vessels, and that line from Herodotus could be interpreted as silver being necessary for good-quality water. So, okay, let's ask: what's up with the silver?

Silver shiny.

This is pretty obvious in retrospect, but silver is commonly known as a precious metal coveted as wealth and beauty; if one is to claim that some things made of silver were actually being used for a completely different purpose, you better have a good reason for saying so - and peering at a single line through your fingers is pretty garbage evidence.

But, it'd be poor form of us to criticise without citations.

We can compare this dearth of silver as water treatment with other factors; Hippocrates,^[16] Celsus,^[17] Pliny,^[18] and Frontinus^[19] refer to boiling and the importance of clean water sources, with no mention of silver. Unfortunately, when it comes to food & wine:

Written sources almost entirely neglect information on storing because it was a household matter.^[20]

The morsels we do get make no mention of silver.

As an aside, we sometimes read mentions of Pliny referring to the healing properties of silver;^[21] in actuality, he's talking about putting lead on your wounds.^[22]

(please do not put lead in your wounds)

We can also compare this dearth of evidence for the purpose of silver being preservative with the wealth of evidence that silver was very explicitly about wealth. In Silver and society in late antiquity, Ruth E. Leader-Newby highlights the importance silver had to literally display your wealth, but also as a store - Michael Vickers outright refers to silver objects as 'large-denomination banknotes' in Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery. The enormous wealth of temples and sanctuaries was stored in silver, from household objects (including vessels) donated to them and in dedication in the form of statues and decoration; it was expected that these would be melted down to meet financial needs, much like how silver vessels would be readily melted down and recast or traded as needs met.

Silver also served an artistic role, but one that was explicitly connected to wealth: original designs would be crafted in gold, silver or ivory, and copies in cheaper materials - bronze, glass, and pottery - would be produced as the appropriate pieces given to those of a lower social standing. Some of our surviving objects made from these materials are actually copies of silver (or gold) objects that have since been melted down and lost to time, and this includes vessels - though the extent of this is hard to know, especially with looters in the mix. Of course, the "master" wouldn't need to be silver if you wanted, say, pottery; bronze alone could do.^[23]

Which leads us to a third point: silver vessels weren't some unique puzzle that needs a clever solution to explain their existence, they were a normal part of the elite's wealth. They also sat alongside other silver objects, and the idea that vessels would have some special purpose is entirely unjustified.

Or, to use fewer words: Cyrus the Great used silver vessels because he was wealthy, and...

Silver shiny.

Leaving the ancients behind, things get less specific in the claims of silver being used to purify: wealthy families start eating with silverware for their health,^[24][25] babies get the "silver spoon" to be healthy,^[26][27] and there's an association made between the church and silver being "holy" because of its purifying properties.^[28][29]

What there isn't is a single historical person stating their intent; not a single person saying that silver means cleaner water or food, or connecting it to overall cleanliness. People still cared about water sources, and boiling if need be;^[30][31] they still talked about silver, and even had limited medical uses for it,^[32] but nothing connecting the two.

Obviously, the wealthy were still using silver because of its luxury status - much like they use(d) gold, silk, ivory and the like - and the same thinking applies; sure, they used silver around food, but they also used silver for candlesticks and statues. They also had a tendency to apply gilding, enamel, and niello - which doesn't really make sense if you think they want their water to contact silver, but makes sense if you think it makes things look nicer. Neither does preferring gold if you can afford it. It's also worth pointing out at this point that silver is not magic: silver utensils and dishware won't purify your food and water; you need your goods to stay in contact for a long period of time for the silver to leech in and have any measurable effect, and the effect it does have is contested.^[33] On a completely unrelated note, guess what cisterns were not made out of?

Oh, but the Church. They love their silver, they love their magical healing, so there's something there, right?

Ruth E. Leader-Newby has a chapter dedicated to covering the early Church's relation with silver as wealth, noting its association with non-religious material attitudes:

the late antique Church developed its own distinctive set of meanings for the silver and other types of precious materials which decorated its buildings. These meanings co-exist with, rather than replace, the secular and materialist attitudes towards the use of such media. [pg72]

(Also, silver shiny)

The cross which crowns the dome of the ciborium is described in these terms: ‘At the very summit flashes forth the trophy that is victorious over death: by its silver composition it amazes our corporeal eyes, while by bringing Christ to mind, it illuminates with grace the eyes of the intellect – I mean the life-giving and venerable cross of God our Saviour.' [pg70]

There are also several stories where the religious value of silver objects was not in them being silver; silver was clearly valued, though it's not the silver that brings purity, but how the silver was treated: A prostitute's silver chamber pot is unworthy of religious use, a man looking to wash his feet in holy silver to cure an infection is

rash enough to presume that the healing power of saints’ relics applied also to liturgical vessels, when as Gregory pointed out, their sanctity was of an altogether different order. [pg98]

...and gets permanently crippled for this faux pas; and silver is donated to the church instead of given away to the poor because of

her fear that her worldly goods might be subject to worldly pollution after her death. It is as if her and her husband’s silk robes and silver plate – which would have been required by their position in the patrician Caesaria’s household – had been already semi-sacralized by their ownership, and so the obvious way to protect that status is to transform these goods into consecrated church possessions. [pg69]

Much as the ancient temples and sanctuaries hoarded silver for secular reasons of wealth and social status,

the sacred use of silver was defined through its differentiation from secular uses. [pg110]

It's enough for an object to be silver to have monetary and artistic value to the Church, but it's explicitly not silver itself that has holy power, which you'd expect if you thought people in the past thought silver could kill infections in liquids.

Oh, also: there's a trend of parcel-gilding your chalices, where you add a layer of gold to the inside. The only bit of the chalice that matters when being in contact with water. Also solid gold was preferred to silver if available. For some reason.

Gold shiny.

Before our doctors move on to the reports of Victorian age doctors where the actual history begins, we're slapped with one last Hail Mary - coins. So it goes, American pioneers^[2] (or Australian settlers^[34] (or Indians^[35] )) dropped silver coins into jugs of water or milk to keep them fresh - while regular folk tossed coins into wishing wells and fountains because it kept the water clean.^[36][37][38]

The earliest example I can find for the former is from 1978, in volume 83 of Science Digest,^[39] which uses American settlers and milk. The latter seems to be newer, but I can't reliably find sources; the oldest I can get is a 2009 edit to the Wikipedia page on wishing wells.^[40]

People throw lots of things into wishing wells - beads, buttons, pins;^[41][42] they're thrown into rivers,^[43] lakes, coins get lodged into trees and the rocky walls of a barrow;^[44] people leave cloth^[42][45] and candles^[44] at the site. The purpose of these is explained to those who listen: offerings to a guardian spirit within, payment, or metaphorically casting disease into the water.^[42][46] Taking a specific narrow instance - people casting silver and copper coins into drinking sources - and trying to reason backwards a theory that "makes sense" (namely, people connecting the action with good health) with no regard as to the wider tradition does not lend you useful insights; you're just making shit up.

On the other hand, the earliest mention of dropping coins in jugs I can find is a 1945 technical manual from the American Military on Military Water Supply and Purification, telling users that

The addition of silver in the form of a silver coin does not provide any disinfecting action and may introduce bacteria^[47]

which tells us that people did put coins into personal water sources (and should stop it, please); anecdotally, I found many comments online of people saying their grandparents did the same. There's just one snag: the timeframe for this means it can happen after the disinfecting action of silver entered the medical mainstream, being described at least as early as 1869 by Jules Raulin,^[48] a former student of Louis Pasteur - enough time to inspire genuine folk attitudes that stick around before silver gets its second wind. This does mean, however, that the narrative of "rediscovering lost folk wisdom" doesn't really hold up; I am also unable to locate any sources that American or Australian settlers practiced this.

To round out this argument, there are earlier texts on the medical purpose of silver that provide some history - but only verifiable history; the most commonly cited is Argyria; the pharmacology of silver^[49] from 1939 which briefly covers silver nitrate and the actually existing work of Avicenna - though I can't say that without noting it makes the common mistake of attributing silver coated pills to him^[50] - with zero mention of preservation. Germicidal Properties of Silver in Water^[51] from 1936 relates only Herodotus' account. None of the early discussions on oligodynamics I looked through mentioned any history to draw on.

In conclusion: silver was commonly used as a luxury good for a variety of purposes - if you're going to claim that a subset of those purposes actually had a completely different motive then you'd better show examples of intent. We have intent of scattered other medical uses, like Avicenna's silver catheters, but silver vessels really do just be vessels made from silver.

Also, academics really don't care about disciplines that aren't their own. Seriously, the amount of papers in medical journals that had no citations or irrelevant citations or wrong citations for their history sections was mind-numbing; I could understand citing a paper that was wrong, but a lot of this seems to be doctors inserting folk-beliefs because history just needs to "make sense" and you can call it a day. These things have hundreds or thousands of citations!

I didn't find a single history source that even hinted at any of these claims. Just doctors citing doctors citing doctors citing...

Bibliography

• Leader-Newby, Ruth E. Silver and society in late antiquity: functions and meanings of silver plate in the fourth to seventh centuries. Routledge (2017).

• Vickers, Michael J., and David Gill. Artful crafts: ancient Greek silverware and pottery. (1994).

References

[1] Möhler, Jasper S., et al. "Silver bullets: A new lustre on an old antimicrobial agent." Biotechnology advances 36.5 (2018): 1391-1411.

[2] Alexander, J. Wesley. "History of the medical use of silver." Surgical infections 10.3 (2009): 289-292.

[3] Barillo, David J., and David E. Marx. "Silver in medicine: A brief history BC 335 to present." Burns 40 (2014): S3-S8.

[4] Wallner, Christoph, et al. "Burn care in the Greek and Roman antiquity." Medicina 56.12 (2020): 657.

[5] Kaiser, Kyra G., et al. "Nanosilver: An old antibacterial agent with great promise in the fight against antibiotic resistance." Antibiotics 12.8 (2023): 1264.

[6] https://www.purecolloids.co.uk/silver-history/

[7] White, Richard J. "An historical overview of the use of silver in wound management." British Journal of Community Nursing 6.Sup1 (2001): 3-8.

[8] http://www.solarsaver.co.uk/water%20treatment.htm

[9] Davies, Richard L., and Samuel F. Etris. "The development and functions of silver in water purification and disease control." Catalysis Today 36.1 (1997): 107-114.

[10] Lawrence, Carl A., and Seymour Stanton Block. Disinfection, sterilization, and preservation. (1968): 381-382.

[11] Russell, A. D., and W. B. Hugo. "7 antimicrobial activity and action of silver." Progress in medicinal chemistry 31 (1994): 351-370.

[12] Russell, Allan Denver, William Barry Hugo, and Graham AJ Ayliffe, eds. Principles and practice of disinfection, preservation and sterilization. Blackwell Scientific Publications (1982): 3.

[13] Herodotus, Histories 1.188.

[14] Dairy Engineering 75, Grampian Press (1958): 250.

[15] Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae.

[16] Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places.

[17] A. Cornelius Celsus, De Medicina 3.23.7.

[18] Pliny the Elder, The Natural History 31.1.

[19] Frontinus, De aquaeductu 1.

[20] Grünbart, M. "Store in a cool and dry place: perishable goods and their preservation in Byzantium" in: Eat, drink and be merry (Luke 12: 19) - Food and wine in Byzantium. In honour of Professor AAM Bryer, ed. L. Brubaker, K. Linardou, Routledge (2007): 39-49.

[21] Davies, Richard L., and Samuel F. Etris. "The development and functions of silver in water purification and disease control." Catalysis Today 36.1 (1997): 107-114.

[22] Rehren, Thilo, et al. "Litharge from Laurion: A medical and metallurgical commodity from South Attika." L'antiquité classique 68 (1999): 299-308.

[23] Crouwel, J. H., and C. E. Morris. "The Minoan amphoroid krater: from production to consumption." Annual of the British School at Athens 110 (2015): 153-155.

[24] Medici, Serenella, et al. "Medical uses of silver: history, myths, and scientific evidence." Journal of medicinal chemistry 62.13 (2019): 5923-5943.

[25] https://www.fohbc.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/BabyBottlesSilver_BE_JanFeb2009.pdf

[26] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swSj0eAdA-k

[27] https://sovereignsilver.com/pages/history-of-silver

[28] https://www.lepentoledellasalute.it/tecnologia_eng.php

[29] https://www.reddit.com/r/mythology/comments/cjv962/comment/evgkncj/

[30] Chatzelis, Georgios, and Jonathan Harris. A tenth-century Byzantine military manual: the Sylloge tacticorum. Routledge (2017).

[31] Hildegard of Bingen. Causae et curae, ed. Mary Palmquist and John Kulas. Trans. Manfred Pawlik and Patrick Madigan. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press (1994).

[32] Avicenna. Canon (Padua, 1476): book 2, treatise 2, chapter LXV.

[33] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-HEP-ECH-WSH-2021.7

[34] http://www.silver-colloids.com/Pubs/history-silver.html

[35] Moritz, Andreas. Timeless secrets of health and rejuvenation. Ener-Chi Wellness Center (2005): 409

[36] Fromm, Katharina M. "Give silver a shine." Nature chemistry 3.2 (2011): 178-178.

[37] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishing_well

[38] https://uk.iherb.com/blog/what-is-colloidal-silver/367

[39] Powell, Jim. "Silver: Emerging As Our Mightiest Germ Fighter", in: Science Digest. Science Digest, Incorporated (1978): 59.

[40] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wishing_well&diff=prev&oldid=283267059

[41] Rhŷs, John. Celtic Folklore Welsh And Manx. Oxford (1901).

[42] Dundes, Alan. "The folklore of wishing wells." American Imago 19.1 (1962): 27-34.

[43] Pliny, Letters viii. 8.

[44] Houlbrook, Ceri. "The penny’s dropped: Renegotiating the contemporary coin deposit." Journal of Material Culture 20.2 (2015): 173-189.

[45] Gerry, Jane, and Hasan El-Shamy. Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature. (2005): 211.

[46] Hope, Robert Charles. The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England: Including Rivers, Lakes, Fountains and Springs. Stock (1893).

[47] Military Water Supply and Purification. United States, U.S. Government Printing Office (1945): 38.

[48] Raulin, Jules. "Ëtudes cliniques sur la vëgëtation." Annales des Scienceas Naturelle: Botanique 11 (1869): 220.

[49] Hill, William Robinson. Argyria; the pharmacology of silver. The Williams & Wilkins company (1939): 1-2.

[50] Bela, Zbigniew. "Who invented 'Avicenna's gilded pills'?." Early Science and Medicine 11.1 (2006): 1-10.

[51] Just, J., and A. Szniolis. "Germicidal properties of silver in water." American Water Works Association 28.4 (1936): 492-506.

All the cool kids are doing experimental archeology now right? So I figured, why don't I join in.

I love Steak Tartare. Now if you aren't familiar with the dish, it is beef tenderloin (or actually my preference is a tender sirloin tip), chopped or ground, and then aggressively seasoned and served raw. Typically served with an egg yolk over crispy bread (I prefer a pringle chip). Looks like this.

I got one a few weeks ago, and the menu had the traditional story of the history of steak tartars. Or allegedly:

It is widely believed that steak tartare originated with the Tatar people of Mongolia some 800 years ago, who placed raw meat under their saddles for long journeys. The tenderised flesh was then eaten raw.

I got this story from the South China Morning Post, but you see similar variations of this story on restaurant menus and food blogs around the world. Now, even the SCMP themselves doubt this story, as the following line states "While this has never been proven and is likely to be a long tale". But alas, some variation of this story seems to be a common explanation.

One popular variation of the story from the well known butcher's shop Parson's Nose states:

Legend states that these Tatars, or mounted nomads, would secrete a piece of horsemeat under the saddle prior to a day’s marauding. By nightfall the tenderised piece of equine putty could be munched with a glass of mare’s milk. Or, in extremis, a shot of plasma from a blooded animal.

The New York Times argues that the Tatar connection is a myth, instead, the article argues that Steak Tartare was a French creation, where the consumption of horse meat became a thing due to beef shortages during the Franco-Prussian War. Allegedly, the original dish was associated with Americans and named "beefsteack à l'Américaine". The name Steak Tartare came later and originated from the Tartar sauce that the dish was commonly served with.

There's a lot of conflicting sources, but as the basic idea goes - Tatars would stick a piece of meat, either beef or horse, under their butt between the saddle and the horse. They'd ride around a bit, and the impact would pulverize the meat into a mince like texture. They would then eat this raw. The concept traveled over to Paris, where Parisian chefs added some seasoning and started serving it in their bistros.

So today, I want to talk about two different aspects of the story:

• Did nomadic people, whether Tatar or otherwise, stuff something under their butt on their horse to make steak tartare? or some sort of edible food? Even if we cannot conclusively establish whether the modern dish originated with the Tatars, and we believe that it was invented independently later on, were there nomads who did something similar?

• Regardless of whether the Tartar people used to do it or not, can you make steak tartar by sticking a hunk of beef under your butt?

Question 1: Did nomadic peoples stick something under their butts to make steak tartare?

The sources we have about Tartar and nomadic food practices are iffy at best. There's a few sources that claim practices similar to the alleged origin of Steak Tartare that various nomadic people like to practice.

Jean de Joinville famously claimed that Tatars would put strips of raw meat under their saddles and tenderize it. They would then eat these strips of meat raw. This is where Wikipedia claims that the name came from.

A few hundred years earlier, Ammianus Marcellinus claimed that the huns would take:

half-raw flesh of any kind of animal whatever, which they put between their thighs and the backs of their horses, and thus warm it a little.

Hmm, this story sounds questionable, since there could not have been enough heat generated through this process to seriously warm the meat - It would likely get no warmer than the temperature of the horse or the rider, even though there might be some friction or impact creating heat. There's also quite a bit of discussion where people have casted doubt on the veracity of this story.

Although, even if this story is true, it still suggests that they are trying to create something different than steak tartare - The steak tartare we're all familiar with is served either cold or at room temperature. Trying to "warm it a little" is kinda defeating the point.

Some people argue that the purpose of putting meat under your saddle is actually to absorb the horse sweat to salt the meat. Then, over long periods of time in the saddle, the meat would get dried out and salted. Essentially creating a jerky like thing. Again, whether this is true or not is questionable, but there's a lot of people in the Jerky community who believe it and consider it one of the precursors to modern Jerky. Bret Devereaux goes one step further, and claims that the ability to produce jerky with your horse on the go without needing a fire is a particular strength to nomad logics in time of war.

This story at least sounds a bit more plausible - If the meat absorbs salt from the horse, and dries out. If the meat dries fast enough, it would preserve itself. This is actually the reason why Mcdonalds hamburgers don't rot- The surface area of the patty is large enough that moisture loss would preserve the patty before mold sets in.

So it doesn't seem like the Tartars or other nomadic peoples were necessarily creating Steak Tartare under their butts, but there are a number of sources that suggest they stuck beef or other meat under their butt other purposes - Whether it is to create Jerky, to tenderize the meat, or to warm it up a little. But alas, these sources are a bit iffy, and there are people who doubt them. So I figured I'd better try it myself.

Question 2: Can you make Steak Tartare under your butt?

I figured since there's so much mystery and uncertainty regarding the history of the disk, I figured I'll just go do it myself.

That unfortunately posed a few problems - I don't own a horse, and nobody who owns a horse will let me try this. Apparently, it is extremely risky to both the horse and to both my physical safety and food safety. But you know what I do own? A motorcycle!

So, I went to a local shop, bought some steak, and very quickly seared off the surface a tiny bit. Yes, that is the wuss move, but I figured since I'm going to be pounding the steak with my ass, the surface bacteria might be pounded into the interior, so I at least used heat to kill off microbes on the surface. Then I sealed it into a vacuum bag, and made it look like this:

Step 1: https://i.imgur.com/WidWWCh.jpeg

I then taped it onto the seat of my motorcycle, put on some Village People, and hopped on to vigorously ride my meat. The problem is that this makes my motorcycle seat extremely slippery, but I held on with my thighs and went for a ride.

Step 2: https://i.imgur.com/7Z0irUU.jpeg

I then went riding for 2 hours or so, making sure to go on and off road, with some long stretches of unpaved roads, and making sure to hit every pot hole and railroad crossing I can find.

Step 3: https://i.imgur.com/i4PmIFG.jpeg

I came home and the meat wasn't very warm (contrary to Ammianus Marcellinus's claims), and opened up the package. The meat looks a bit flattened, but the muscle fibers were still solid and attached. Verdict? Very much not tartare in the modern sense. And it makes sense right? You wouldn't go hit a piece of meat with a mallet over and over again to make tartar, but perhaps Jean de Joinville isn't necessarily wrong, this hunk of meat might be tenderized through the impacts.

Step 4: https://i.imgur.com/A6gJu9Z.jpeg

Now, I could end things here, but where's the fun in that? After all, to quote Goda, Ryuji in his seminal work - Yakuza, Vol. 2. "A real man's ought to be a little stupid", and so, I chilled the beef, chopped it, seasoned it, threw in a raw egg yolk and gave it a try.

Step 5: https://i.imgur.com/okoUTyK.jpeg

First of all, I'm still alive, and not food poisoned! I'm writing this post the following morning, and I think I'm in the clear. Did the tartare taste fine? yeah, it more or less tastes OK. No Complaints there. Was the beef more tender? Well, I couldn't really tell. This is something for brave people in the future to follow up on!

Conclusion:

Can you make tartar with your butt? Probably not. A steak tartare, as commonly served is either chopped or ground beef and then seasoned. The fundamental action of your butt bouncing up and down is blunt impact, which is insufficient (at least on a motorcycle), to break up and pulverize the meat into a tartare. Just think about how inefficient it would be to make tartare by smacking it with a mallet?

Sources:

• My ass
• The secret to a succulent steak tartare: Hong Kong chefs Mario Paecke of Margo and Nicolas Boutin of Ami and Wood Ear reveal their top tips | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)
• The Raw Truth: Don't Blame the Mongols (or Their Horses) - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
• Steak tartare | Ingredients, Origin, & Sauce | Britannica
• Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part II: Subsistence on the Hoof – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (acoup.blog)
• Steak Tartare: a story beyond rare | Journal | Parson's Nose (parsonsnose.co.uk)
• Gengis Kahn and the dried meat... - 25 Snack: The Italian Jerky

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

To celebrate the annual pearl clutching over Indigenous People’s Day/Columbus Day Conor wants to let us all know he is too cool for this small-minded debate. He will instead be taking his ball of ignorance and erasure home and commemorating World Explorer’s Day, I guess by mapping his backyard or something...

World Explorers’ Day would extol a quality common to our past and vital to our future, honoring all humans––Indigenous and otherwise—who’ve set off into the unknown, expanding what we know of the world.

Maybe I’m just grumpy. I’m working on a long-term project examining the mechanisms of erasure used to diminish land claims for indigenous nations in New England, with repercussions for state and federal tribal recognition that continue to influence modern descendants. In this headspace I could not let his Ode to Great Man History, with a concerning dose of whatabout-ism, go without comment. As usual when I write here, please feel free to jump in with additions and corrections so I can learn from my mistakes. Here we go…

Columbus and Great Man History

After declaring his own federal holiday Conor dives into the complete absence of notoriety surrounding Columbus in the U.S. until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. A combination of factors, including Italian immigrants actively attempting to combat xenophobia against new arrivals, and Progressive Era construction of a national story, lifted Columbus to the ranks of exalted explorer. I talked a little about the mythmaking surrounding Columbus specifically when discussing Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise. To quote from that entry…

The Columbus myth can be contextualized by two distinct historical processes: (1) the fifteenth-century Portuguese expansion into the Atlantic, and (2) the nineteenth-century process of mythologizing Columbus in the English-speaking world. As shown earlier, in the context of Portuguese exploration at the time, venturing further into the Atlantic was the next logical step. Put bluntly, had Columbus not reached the Americas, any one of numerous other navigators would have done so within a decade, as evidenced by Cabral exploring the Brazilian coast in 1500 and Ojeda and Vespucci following the Venezuelan coast in 1499. The second portion of the myth, the growth of popularity in the English-speaking world, started shortly after the U.S. Revolution and the tricentennial of his landing in 1792. Historians like Washington Irving so popularized the Columbus legend that the 1892 celebrations cemented the image of the great man. In 1912 Columbus Day became an official U.S. holiday.

We discussed Great Man History in the [Myths of Conquest Series, Part One] (https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2qn5us/myths_of_conquest_part_one_a_handful_of/). The Great Man Myth, as Restall reminds us

ignores the roles played by larger processes of social change… fails to recognize the significance of context and the degree to which the great men are obliged to react to-rather than fashion- events, forces, and the many other human beings around them… It likewise renders virtually invisible the Native Americans and Africans who played crucial roles in these events (p. 4-6).

To that end, Conor would like to remind you Leif Erikson, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, Amelia Earhart, Jacques Cousteau, Yuri Gagarin, and Neil Armstrong were explorers worthy of honor. Notice anything about that list? If you guessed the complete absence of indigenous peoples you get a prize.

Ignorance and Indigenous Erasure

How Conor managed to write, and The Atlantic editors managed to approve, an article on Indigenous People’s Day that completely fails to (1) mention any Native North and South American by name or nation (other than “the nomads who crossed the Bering Strait” and those bloodthirsty Aztecs which I’ll get to shortly), (2) failed to cite the groundbreaking work of amazing indigenous historians, and (3) completely ignored any modern indigenous people’s perspective of Indigenous People’s Day is confounding.

In the entire article he quotes Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, originally published more than forty years ago, and one scholar of Polynesian history. That is it.

But wait, why didn’t he bother to research indigenous history? Because they were bad.

Admittedly, Explorers’ Day would encompass multiple humans who conquered and enslaved. But Indigenous Peoples’ Day similarly encompasses all of the New World peoples who enslaved others long before 1492, tribes that traded in African slaves into the 1800s, and brutal hegemons such as the Aztecs, who warred with neighbors, sacrificed humans, and ran extractive empires. These facts in no way excuse the atrocities that Columbus and other Europeans perpetrated. But they underscore that no past civilization upheld modern human rights, enlightenment universalism, and anti-racism.

I really hope Conor’s kids, if he has them, use this logic when refusing to learn about, well, anything. “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t do my history homework. I can’t learn about Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or the Declaration of Independence because roughly a third of the signers owned slaves.”

I can’t help but think this sophomoric whatabout-ism is used as a balm to cover a complete ignorance of indigenous history, and the current fight for recognition and reconciliation. Indigenous people are still here There are 574 federally recognized tribes, with dozens more continuing the fight for recognition. Ignorance of their history, as well as the current economic and health disparities, only perpetuates the erasure of entire peoples.

I hoped for more from The Atlantic.

In 1900 the magazine was one of the first, and only, to publish works by Red Progressives like Yankton Dakota author, educator, and musician Zitkala-Ša as they brought the abuses of the federal boarding school system to public consciousness, and fought for indigenous civil rights. This first wave of activism used the platform provided by The Atlantic to advocate for indigenous citizenship (finally achieved in 1924), and demand reforms to a violent boarding school system that sought to extinguish indigenous languages and identity in the United States.

By ignoring the deep story of this continent The Atlantic betrays it’s own history, and erases it’s own good work.

If you want to read good indigenous history check out

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk

Native Nations: A Millenium in North America by Kathleen Duval

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas by Jeffrey Ostler

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall

Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America by Daniel Richter

A recent release from the ‘Timeline - World History Documentaries’ YouTube channel repeated the claim that early 20th century archaeologist Ralegh Radford located the site of what 12th century monks claimed (fraudulently) was King Arthur & Guinevere’s grave.

Radford absolutely did NOT find the grave that the monks had excavated (or possibly wholly fabricated), although he did claim that he had. Ironically, the definitive debunk of this (Gilchrist & Green, 2015) is actually obliquely referenced at the end of the documentary. Clearly the researchers did not actually read it or even find the University of Reading’s summary of the claim.

The documentary first claims that Radford located “gaping holes” that would have located “two gigantic pillars” that flanked the Arthurian grave. This is in itself a massive stretch as Gilchrist & Green (p.426) explain:

It was suggested that one of the pyramids may have been erected above the remains that had been interpreted by Radford as a burial chamber; there is no archaeological

evidence to support this. A ‘robbed socket’ [C:6003] to the west in Trench 104 was recorded as a possible location for the other pyramid (fig 4.7); however, this is more likely to have represented a grave marker.

It’s worse than that though. Contrary to Radford finding “an empty grave exactly where Radford said it would be”, he didn’t find a grave at all, much less one of the correct period. To quote from the book’s ‘Conclusions’ chapter:

Did Radford locate ‘Arthur’s grave’, as he claimed, or at least the site of the 1191 exhumation? The excavation records confirm that the feature located in the monks’ cemetery in 1962 was merely a pit and not a grave. The cist graves at the base of the pit are now regarded as eleventh-century or later and provide a terminus post quem (see Chapter 10). The pit cut into a cist burial and was cut by a feature interpreted as the robbing of one of the flanking pyramids; this contained fifteenth-century pottery. On this basis, we can conclude only that Radford excavated a pit in the cemetery and that this feature was likely to date between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. Finally, it is worth noting the testimony of one of Radford’s site supervisors: Peter Poyntz-Wright recalls that the surface of the pit was clearly visible cutting through the 1184 fire layer. This would indicate a date later than 1184 for the pit. We must conclude that there is no archaeological evidence to support Radford’s claim that he located the 1191 exhumation site of the graves that were believed to be those of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere.

The documentary ends by attempting to vindicate Radford’s hypothesis. It correctly states that ‘Tintagel ware’ ceramics (now called ‘LRA1’) were identified a decade after his death. They were; but not in any way associated with Radford’s claimed Arthurian grave (pit), which remains late 12th century at the earliest. It was already suspected that Glastonbury Tor would have been occupied as early as the 6th century CE - this find confirms that and is significant for that reason, but does nothing for Radford’s hypothesis. 

Finally, I need to address what the documentary fails to include at all - the fact that the discovery of Arthur’s grave in the first place universally regarded as a hoax by all serious authors, even by those who place stock in the existence of an historical Arthur (I don’t, for what it’s worth). Our earliest source for it is Gerald of Wales’ ‘De Principis Instructione’ (1193-96) who is a mixed bag as far as reliability goes. He thought that beavers bit off their own bollocks and threw them at their attackers. Even at the time people had their doubts about at least some Arthurian stories. As Robert Bartlett notes in ‘England under the Norman and Angevin Kings: 1075-1225’ (2002) Gerald himself informs us that the term “a fable of Arthur” (Arturi Fabula) was being used metaphorically by his enemies in the sense of a “fictitious and frivolous” story. Still, Gerald was writing just after the alleged discovery and claims to have seen the cross (interestingly, not the remains) with his own eyes. I think we can accept him as a somewhat reliable primary source here. Indeed, many accept that the monks found some sort of interment – after all they were sitting on a ton of already-centuries-old graves, although Radford’s claim to have located the monks’ excavation is now debunked. The problem is that the only part of the find that ties it to Arthur (other than the claim that his bones and skull were comically large) is the supposed lead cross with its inscription;

“Hic iacet sepultus inclytus rex Arthurus cum Weneuereia vxore sua secunda in insula Auallonia”

As Nitze wrote in 1934; “It is unnecessary to comment on the evidently faked character of this inscription.” By which he means, I suspect, that it’s not only out of character with any period epitaph, it’s simply too “on the nose”. Not just King Arthur, but the “famous King Arthur” – with specific and curiously redundant mention of the Isle of Avalon. If Arthur was so famous, why the need to say so? If Glastonbury was already identified as Avalon, why would they need to say so? Regardless of that, when have you ever seen a grave marker of any kind that included the place of burial? Why is Arthur called “King” on the cross when Arthur was not referred to as king or inclitus until Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Geoffrey Historia Regum Britanniae (1138)? The obvious answer to all of this is that the cross was a recent forgery inspired by a mid-late 12th century understanding of who Arthur was or might have been. 

This is the view of Christopher Berard, whose 2019 “Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England: from Henry II to Edward I” is the most recent and most comprehensive discussion on the cross. Berard also points to Aelred Watkin who compares the lettering on this 12th century tympanum in the north doorway of Stoke-sub-Hamdon church in Somerset. At best, the cross’s lettering is inconclusive and could as easily be ca.1190 as ca.500. The monks had plenty of vintage carvings, documents and coins (e.g. the silver penny of Cnut that Oliver Harris suggests is the best match) to refer to for something convincingly old, although personally I don’t think conscious replication of old text would have been a priority in the mediaeval mind (historical accuracy is a recent concept) but Berard believes the lettering, like the cross and the whole shooting match, is late 12th century, and I think he’s absolutely right. Just to include a Welsh author (since Arthur may have been a pan-British myth, but our evidence is all Welsh) Thomas Price chap writing as far back as 1842 was also sceptical. There is a fascinating and very strong hypothesis that part of the motivation for ‘finding’ Arthur’s grave was to put paid to Arthur as a Welsh hero who might yet return, and to recreate him as a very heroic but also very demonstrably dead Anglo-British figure. Clearly this superstition didn’t afflict Price, an enlightened Victorian Welshman. 

The association with Henry II is itself dubious since his having received a tip about the gravesite doesn’t make chronological sense – Henry II finds out about it 1171 but doesn’t bother to act on it before his death years later in 1189. The grave is discovered separately by monks a year or two after that. More importantly, as Charles Wood points out in ‘Fraud and its consequences: Savaric of Bath and the reform of Glastonbury’ (1991, in Essays C. A. Ralegh Radford p. 273-283) this was just the last of a series of improbable discoveries that began just after the near-destruction of the abbey by fire in 1884 (an aspect that History Hit don’t mention). Saints Patrick, Indract, Brigit, Gildas, and Dunstan were all supposedly found in the abbey grounds one after the other – yet Dunstan already had a known burial site at Canterbury, where he had been archbishop. Arthur was the final ‘find’. Glastonbury was also a hub for the forging of historical documents. Basically, anything coming out of mediaeval Glastonbury needs to be treated with the same scepticism as the present-day post-New Age Glastonbury. 

NB The last portion of the above is taken from one of my earlier blog posts (The BS Historian, 2023). 

Sources

Gilchrist, Roberta & Green, Cheryl. Glastonbury Abbey: Archaeological Investigations 1904–79. (Society of Antiquaries of London, 2015). <https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/32051>

The BS Historian. ‘King Arthur didn’t exist, and neither did his sword!’. Wordpress blog. 17 September 2023. <https://bshistorian.wordpress.com/2023/09/17/king-arthur-didnt-exist-and-neither-did-his-sword/>

University of Reading [no date]. ‘Radford’s Excavation’ <https://research.reading.ac.uk/glastonburyabbeyarchaeology/digital/arthurs-tomb-c-1331/radfords-excavation/>

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Monthly post for all your debunk or debate requests. Top level comments need to be either a debunk request or start a discussion.

Please note that R2 still applies to debunk/debate comments and include:

• A summary of or preferably a link to the specific material you wish to have debated or debunked.
• An explanation of what you think is mistaken about this and why you would like a second opinion.

Do not request entire books, shows, or films to be debunked. Use specific examples (e.g. a chapter of a book, the armour design on a show) or your comment will be removed.