GUTTERED CANDLE

In my grandmother’s knotted hands, 

she held the sorrow and joy of a lifetime,

she held hope for the future locked

in the eyes of her grandchildren.

Those hands that tilled the soil, 

that harvested the fruit, shucked corn, 

skinned deer, plucked quail. I remember

the way she chopped wood, the heft of the axe,

how she banked the fire, the way she kept us safe.

She brought back the past, made it come alive—

all those old stories of the Ireland she left as a girl,

A time when people were closer to the land. 

She held the stories of the Otherworld, a record 

of when the old gods walked freely among us,

bringing dreams and mischief to the land.

Her mother lit the candle, as did her mother before her,

placing it in the window so that the ancestors 

could find their way home in the dark.

12/8

A NOTE TO CÚ CHULAINN

Oh, Hound of Cullen, 

I always wanted to ask you,

who did your hair? I mean 

with all those electrified locks 

standing upright like needles in rainbow hues,

capable of striking your enemies dead,

would be tricky to lime into dreadlocks.

And your superhuman strength—beyond imagining, 

with your seven fingers on each hand,

and seven toes on each foot, 

did they need special shoes, pampooties,

and which little piggies went to market? 

And what about those seven-pupiled eyes 

that could see beyond the curtain of time, 

unshielded by the glamor of Ray Bans,

did they help you to win your battles? 

What was the fabric of your dreams made of?

You, who were born of Lugh, the god of sun & light.

Sétanta, may I call you by your given name,

instead of your battlefield handle, Cú Chulainn, 

O Hound of War, for you turned your body inside out 

to scare the enemy, and your trusty grey horse & chariot 

were always at the ready, ready to die for you.

And you with your gáe bolga, a superpower weapon

unleashed against the backdrop of the Bronze Age, 

reimagined by monks during the Middle Ages, 

would wait another millennium before it was made real, 

a grenade for the ages. I am come. Destroyer of worlds.

But you broke your geis, because you could not refuse 

the hospitality of the hag, offering you the taboo 

of roasted dog, eating your namesake, 

or refuse hospitality, the cursed twofold dilemma, 

O Hound of Cullen, how you must’ve howled in rage 

by that base trickery, the lón láith, the long light 

shining from your brow, and you came undone, 

your superpowers bleeding back into the earth.

And to think of how you exploded onto the scene, 

upholding the honor of the world as you knew it, 

a world in turmoil, and how you died upright, lashed 

to a standing stone so you would not fall in battle,

the Mórrighan and her scaldcrows on the battlefield,

waiting to pluck out those marvelous eyes,

while we hid beneath our school desks, 

with our arms shielding our eyes, protecting 

our slender necks from the unholy light,

waiting for the bomb to drop. No magic cloak 

of forgetfulness to hide our fear.

11/23/22 Write On! Terri Glass

Links to some of my foodie bloggies

I was compiling a bloglist of foodways for my latest food blog, expecting to find a mere handful. Instead, I found 25 blog posts, and when I compiled a growing list, for some inexplicable reason, Blogger erratically erased the correct links. I had to redo this list too many times to count. I no sooner fixed three dead links, then when I reformatted it, other links went wonky. And so on. For every step forward, I retreated two steps. It took me most of the day to undo the damage. Shame on you Blogger for once again making what once was a relatively simple task into a logistical nightmare. Ditto that with your dogged changing of spelling in the search window. Foodways is a real word. The links are in no particular order, but are mostly chronological in nature. I'm sure I missed a few.

A note on native foodways in the British Isles vs. foods introduced by Romans
Wild Apples

Defiant Fruitcakes

A note on Medieval spices

A note on Medieval turnspit dogs

Folklore: Foodways, saying, a food thief/ house sprite
Folklore: Foodways/ How to make Irish Soda Bread

Folklore: Irish Soda Bread Recipe
Corned beef & cabbage came out of Hell's Kitchen

Groundcherries by any other name 

On Jack O Lanterns and squashes 
Lemon Meringue Merengue
Elderberry Whine

Baking a Cake on Bastille Day

Writing down the bone soup

Recipe for bone broth
Tea vs Chai—if by Land, or Sea
Tapping trees: a soggy story
Arbutus, Madroño, or a Strawberry Tree by any other name
Irish salmon
Naked man in a filbert bush, and spotted dick

Shrove Tuesday Pancakes

Fat Tuesday pancakes

Huckleberries

Wild Apples

The apples are good from this feral volunteer that chose to grow on a rocky outcrop

An otherwise lovely story on apples in The Guardian that appeared last May, claimed that all apples came from Kazakhistan. My immediate knee-jerk reaction was that the statement was wrong on so many levels.

The geographic origin of the apple can be traced to modern-day Kazakhstan but the Romans are the ones that popularized it the most. Gardens: why we need to protect Kazakhstan’s wild apples

And the more I delved into that sentence, the more wrong it seemed. My second thought was: What were the Romans doing in Kazakhstan, anyway? Did I miss that history lesson? And what about the native apples of Asia? Merely hearsay? The chase was on.

I agree we need to protect Kazakhstani apples, but the birthplace of the modern apple is Central Asia, specifically the Altai and the Tian Shan Mountains—which includes not only Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Xinjiang in Northwest China—in other words, the Silk Road. The sentence should have scanned: "modern apples." And my hackles wouldn’t have been raised. (See the Smithsonian article for a more accurate history.)

Despite popular belief, a species of wild apples (Malus sylvestris) were already in the British Isles long before the Romans arrived (they just brought bigger, better apples). Circa 98 AD, Roman historian Gaius Tacitus reported that the Briton Druid Ovates carried silver apple boughs with bronze, silver, or gold bells. And in Ireland, Otherworld apples also feature prominently in Echtrae Chonnlai which was recorded in the 8th or 9th c., but it's a much older tale. And in The Song of Wandering Aengus, Yeats made famous the lines lifted from Irish folklore, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun. 

But the wild European crabapple was native to the British Isles long before the Romans or Christianity reached its shores. In fact, there is evidence that wild apples grew wild in Ireland and Britain during the Neolithic era. It’s a Northern Hemisphere circumpolar boreal plant along with raspberries, salmonberries and roses, buttercups, crucíferos plants, hazels, and vaccinium species including cranberries and blueberries.

The word apple is embedded in many insular place-names that predate Roman occupation in the British Isles. Anglesey, the Isle of Apples, Avalon. Anglesey (Ynys Môn) was sometimes called Afallach, or rich in apples. Geoffrey of Monmouth called the island Insule Ponorum, or the island of the apples. In Immram Brain, a síd woman gives Bran a silver branch in white bloom—a cróeb dind abaill a hEmain, or ‘a branch from the apple-tree of Emain. Emain Macha was sometimes called Emain Ablach. –The Apple in Early Irish Narrative.

When I was living in the Ukraine, I was struck by how similar the word apple яблоко yablacko in Russian is to the Irish (genitive) Ablach, clearly a shared Indo-European ancestry.

From Old Irish uball, ubull (Scottish Gaelic ubhal), from Proto-Celtic *abalom (compare Welsh afal), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ébōl (compare English apple, Lithuanian obuolỹs, Russian я́блоко (jábloko), Serbo-Croatian jȁbuka). —Wictionary

And the Celtic apple of the day would've been a quasi-domestic relative of the wild European crabapple Malus sylvestris, aka the small forest apple, not the ancestor of the modern apple, Malus sieversii (native to the mountains of Turkey and Kazakhstan).

The symbol of the apple wasn't necessarily a tradition borrowed from the Middle East. Or the mid-way point to the Far East. Greek historical references to apples predate Roman cultivation, and the role of the apple is central to Bronze Age Celtic lore. Even Homer's Odyssey refers to apples. Then there's the apple tussle of Aphrodite, Athena and Hera to consider. You know, like, Who's the most beautiful goddess of all, and the sour apples of discord? (Those apples may have been quinces, native to the Caucasus.) Fairytale heroine Snow White chokes on an apple and falls asleep for a very long time.

The Greek word "μήλον" for apple or any kind of globular, or round fruit, and fat-bottom girls—is malon, or melon. Think generic. Sort of like asking for a Coke and getting orange soda. In Homeric times, "μήλον" also referred to sheep or goats (my mind wanders to that tree of goats photo). Pomaceous: anything-apple-shaped. Round. There must've been some seriously fat goats. Poet Sappho of Lesbos likened a young bride to an ‘sweet apple’ (gluku’malon). Better than being compared to a fat goat.

When does the word apple enter into the English translation of the Bible as THE depicted forbidden fruit? Bede? (late 7th c.) Aldred? (10th c.) John Wycliffe? (late 14th c.) King James? What was the Latin word: fructus, or malum? Or was it the more drought-tolerant quince? (The Irish monk-scribes would've been reading the Bible bits in Greek and Latin.)

There were certainly native European crab apples in the British Isles since the last Ice Age, but the problem is even thornier than that. Get this: apples, indigenous to cold northern climates, weren't even a Levant fruit. Too dry and too hot. Even way back then.  (They're now carefully propagated in the Golan Heights.) The so-called "apple" of the Holy Land was most likely a sturdy, heat-tolerant quince, popular in the Levant. The apple would've been an unknown fruit in the Middle East during Biblical times. There goes the old Tree of Knowledge metaphor.

I also discovered that the word "apple" was used as a generic term for ALL globular (foreign) fruit and some vegetables (not berries or nuts), as late as the 17th century. Tomatoes were called love apples, cucumbers and potatoes, earth apples. Even oranges were referred to as apples. Because they were ROUND!

The two words for apple and evil in Latin are also a tongue-in-cheek pun: Eve ate a malum (apple—or something fat and round), and became mālum (evil). The Arabic for apple is tuffah, Hebrew is tappuach, from the Aramaic. But it was probably a borrowing, as the so-called apple of the Holy Land was most likely a quince. The apple would've been an unknown fruit in the Middle East during Biblical times.

Also, it's a western European concept to associate apples with the Tree of Knowledge. (When? Probably since the late Middle Ages. The apple is depicted in art during the Renaissance.) So, the much maligned apples were not necessarily considered to be the forbidden fruit during the 6th - 8th centuries. 

It's a muddled idea, at best. Or perhaps it's all muddled old road apples.

The modern apple, Malus pumila, or M. domestica, related to the wild forest apples, the Asian Malus sieversii, and Malus silvestris seems to have had a wide geographic distribution from the British Isles to Central Asia, and then some, and there are no less than four other malus species in North America. It's probably a circumpolar Ice Age relic holarctic plant species like vaccinium.

So, if apples came from Kazakhstan, how in the bleeding blue blazes did they arrive in North America before Columbus, or, say, Lief Erickson? And don't tell me Johnny Appleseed, hero of cider makers everywhere, planted them all. He did sow the Northwest Territories with apple trees. Since he used apple seeds, gawd only knows what wild varieties sprouted since apples don't seed true to form.

In fact, crab apples are also native to the entire Northern Hemisphere. (I had previously learned that apples were brought to the New World by colonists, and scholars still erroneously note European apples originally came by way of Kazakhstan, or China, along with the peach, which really messes with the myriad apple references embedded within Medieval Celtic mythology.) 
 
I am fascinated by the evolution of the apple. With the streamlining of marketable apples, we're down to a handful of tasteless eating apples with names like Fuji, Pink Lady, and Gala. Our Italian neighbor, Mary Bianchi, in Forest Knolls, had cooking apples (monstrous sour things), plus a variety of eating apples including striped winesaps, Gravensteins, and also bitter cider apples.

"Hard apple cider was hugely popular in early America, and cider vinegar was an essential home ingredient." According to Oregonian heirloom apple hunter, David Benscoter, “It is estimated that of the 17,000 named apple varieties originating in North America, only around 4,000 still exist today." —Apple detective finds five more apple varieties thought to be extinct...

According to most definitions, the main difference between a crab apple and an edible, domestic apple is the size of the fruit (and the sourness). But it's more complicated than that. Farmers and cider-makers traditionally waited for the bitter fruit laden with tannin to be kissed and sweetened by the first frost before harvest (similar to bletting).

The familiar edible apples did not grow in North America before the arrival of European settlers. Old World apple trees became established in the New World from the trees and seeds that Dutch and English emigrants brought from Europe. As legend has it, Johnny Appleseed profoundly influenced the spread of apples in North America by sowing them everywhere he traveled, but he was just one of many pioneers who planted apple seeds in the new territories. The original cultivated apple trees also became established naturally through seeds dispersed by birds and mammals. Old World Apples. [For more on Old World apple species, see also "Old-Time Apples," THE WORLD & I, October 1989, p. 388]

Before European apples were introduced to the New World, crab apples were native to North America. Although less familiar than commercial apples, these native American species still grow in the wild. 

In North America, there's Malus ioensis, or prairie crabapple (ioensis refers to Iowa). The most common variety, Malus ioensis var. ioensis, is native to the prairies of the upper Mississippi Valley. Another variety, Malus ioensis var. texana, or the Texas crabapple, is native to a tiny region of central Texas. There's even a Southern crabapple, Malus angustifolia. Then there's Malus fusca, native to western North America from Alaska, with a range from British Columbia, to northwestern California. Flowers are white or pale pink. 

According to a blogpost, Native American Apple, plant taxonomists may quibble over the number of apples native to North America, but most agree that there are four major species. The three eastern species are quite similar to each other. But the lone western species is a bird of a different feather. The western species shares similarities with wild apples native to China, while the three eastern species seem to have Middle East connections—thought to have split off early in the evolution of the genus Malus.

There are an estimated 25-47 different species of Malus worldwide. This number fluctuates greatly due to the ease in which species of Malus are able to hybridize with each other, making the process of differentiation between the species very difficult. Of this number, only four species are native to North America. These species are Malus fusca, Malus coronaria, Malus angustifolia and Malus ioensis. Crab Apple Trees Native to North America.

But worldwide, wild crab apples have become endangered, due to farmers preferring to grow commercial table apples to cider apples (cider crab apple varieties include Foxwhelp, Kingston Black, Yarlington Mill and Dabinett.)

In northern California, there was a wild crab apple tree in the gulch across the way from us where my grandmother used to gather the apples after the first frost. I loved eating them. I never considered it a native species. The diminutive apples were dense, with golden yellow pulp, sweet, but with a bitter astringent afterbite. It was probably a Pacific crab apple or Oregon crab apple. One fall, our new neighbor, in an attempt to tame the land, viciously hacked it down with a chainsaw, and we mourned its loss.

Now, decades later, after I learned that the old crab apple tree wasn't an escapee from some farmer's orchard by way of pooping birds, but a native species, I doubly mourn its loss.

Samhain, a cross-quarter festival

Oíche Shamhna Shona Daoibh! Happy New Year. May the Gates of the Otherworld stay open long enough for you to escape the coming darkness. And mind the Galoshins!

Astronomically speaking, Samhain should be celebrated November 11, which means that gates of the otherworld are open until November 16. Beware!

Modern calend dates are somewhat meaningless as the Julian calendar was off by ten days when the Gregorian calendar was introduced.

In the 8th c., Samhain was shoehorned into the Christian festival calendar of saints, and the original Roman festival of the dead that was celebrated in in May, and later, the Mexican El Día de los Muertos (originally celebrated in summer) was added to the mix. (See my rant, El Dia de los Muertos was moved atop our Day of the Dead/New Year.

Blame Pope Boniface IV for that mass conflagration of holidays to the dead now celebrated on Nov. 1 & 2.

The Celtic fire festivals are held on the cross-quarter days, midway point between the solstices and equinoxes. Samhain means summer’s end. It is part of a harvest-pastoral, or hunter’s festival calendar. Imbolc is the beginning of spring (first milk) and Beltane is the beginning of summer, followed by the games gathering festival of Lugnasa. And the church tacked on a whole slew of saints to each of these festivals in an attempt to desecularize them. Didn’t exactly work.

There is some thought that the festivals predate the coming of the Celts, which is plausible, as the Bell Beaker folk were sometimes called proto-Celts—at least by my anthropology professor. However, the megalithic standing stone monuments wouldn’t record any astronomical alignment to denote the timing of these fire festivals as they’re aligned to the solstices and equinoxes, not the cross-quarter days.

According to the early medieval Irish epics, that reflect an earlier oral tradition, Samhain was equally celebrated in Ireland, and much of the modern Halloween tradition was introduced to Scotland from Ireland.

Whose? I did a Google image search via Sean Folsom, no luck.

The Celtic wheel of the year with the cross-quarter days, nestled between the solstices and equinoxes. Samhain, the end of summer and the beginning of winter, is a harvest festival, (Halloween), followed by Imbolc, or spring (first milk), and Beltane, (May Day) or the beginning of summer, and Lugnasadh, the time for the great games and clan gathering—which lives on today as the Highland Games. Lughnassad (no double s, btw—) or Lunasa, is the festival of Lugh, is the beginning of August. It lives on in Ireland as the Puck Fair. Someone’s thrown in some other festivals. Oestara was not a Celtic festival, nor was Litha, or Yule, but Mabon was celebrated on the continent. It’s a bit of a mishmash, as someone was trying to shoehorn Roman, Germanic, and astrological signs into one thing. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not an antikythera...you can’t mix apples and oranges and a box of thumbtacks and expect it to make a fruit salad

Summer’s End

We’re fast approaching the end of the Celtic year, Samhain, or Summer’s End, which marks the half way mark, or cross-quarter day between the equinox and the solstice. The night when the boundary between this world and the otherworld are thinnest. The night of the great bonfires, where my great-grandfather ran his cattle between two fires to purify them (the other cross quarter day was Beltane)—the smoke was probably also a great pest deterrent. To be fair, the celebration of the cross-quarter days predates the arrival of the Celts, but they took to the custom like ducks to water, or sparks to flame.

In 609AD, Pope Boniface IV decreed November 1 as All Saints Day, or Allhallowmesse, thus placing a Christian spin on the Celtic celebration of Samhain. And since the festival lasted several days, we have Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day as well.

The Irish brought the vestiges of Samhain, rechristened Halloween by the church, to America, and to Scotland. In America, Halloween took off and became the secular extravaganza it is today, thanks to the candy industry, who saw a profit was to be made. During WWII, American GIs stationed in Germany, put on a Halloween festival in a castle, thus reintroducing elements of Samhain to its original Celtic homeland, and also back to Ireland as well.

We associate Halloween with zombies and characters like Frankenstein, but that story was penned during one dreary dreecht summer in Geneva by Irish lass, Mary Shelley, on a bet to produce a ghost story. Galvanizing the dead fits right into the premise of Samhain, or Halloween when the gates to the otherworld are open, the cauldron of plenty could raise the dead, and anything was possible.

Splitting Hares and Rabbiting on

A young brown hare, watercolor, 1502, Albrect Dürer —Wiki

A photographer, hoping to sell prints, conflated rabbits with snowshoe hares calling them Easter Bunnies. Augh! For the record, hares are not bunny rabbits. They're not even distant cousins either. They may look alike, but it's convergent evolution. It's a great herbivore model. But they are a very separate species, even more divergent than sheep are to goats. More like gazelles and sheep. Different genus, Genius!

Through I suspect the hare was the mythological pre-Christian role model, the term, Easter Bunny referred to a rabbit, because in the Middle Ages rabbits (not hares) were called cunnys, which rhymes with bunny and hunny. Baby cunnys were called rabbits (or kits), but that word cunny was later changed to coneys, because prostitutes were called... Well, you get the picture. Coney Island. Rabbits, or....?

European cunnys/conejos (Oryctolagus cuniculus) are not native to most of Europe, they came from Iberia, they're not even native to Northern Europe or Britain. Some historians think rabbits were brought to Northern Europe and Britain by the Romans. But the Romans preferred to eat sleepy doormice. So, this speculation is wrong, as “during the Middle Ages, they were regarded as a high-status food and transported across Europe.” —Discover Magazine

Most historians agree that rabbits were introduced to Northern Europe in the Middle Ages. The Normans brought rabbits to Britain and Ireland. And cunnys were easy dinner fixins'. Which led to a population explosion, and some really weird Medieval manuscript drawings of bloodthirsty hares (not bunnies) armed to the teeth with lances, axes, swords, hellbent on harming humans. 

Hares do not make good pets, they're not domesticated, and share few traits with rabbits. They're solitary creatures, prone to boxing and brawling with potential mates and interlopers alike. The term "mad as a March hare" came from observing their combatative breeding nuptials. (Don't preach to me about the "wrong" use of combatative vs combative. Just. Don't. It's in the OED.) How mad? Go ask Alice.

Lewis Carroll's Alice and the Mad March Hare (a European hare)—Wiki

Mountain hares are smaller than European, or brown hares. The maigheach bhan, or bocaire fasaich, or Scottish mountain hare (Lepus timidus), is a hare of many colors and an astonishing assortment of names: whiddie baudrons, bawtie, cutty, donie, fuddie, lang lugs and maukin. AKA the blue hare, tundra hare, variable hare, the white, snow, or alpine hare (but never an Arctic hare), the mountain hare is big on camo—like ptarmigans and stoats, it turns white in winter—except for the Irish hare (L. t. hibernicus), a separate (sub) species—it prefers to tan the beaches. 

(In Irish mythology, the shapeshifter hare, the giorrea (little deer), is associated with the realm of the Otherworld. To harm a hare carried dire consequences. The warrior Oisín was spirited away to the Otherworld for accidentally wounding a hare with his dart, who was a woman of the Sídhe. Druids used hares in divination and prophesy by catching them, then turning them loose to guise the path of their escape.)

There are hares, and there are even more hares. There are 32 species of hares worldwide, and not one of them can crossbreed with rabbits (they have 48 chromosomes vs. rabbits' 44 chromosomes.) According to an article in LiveScience, “There are … "cryptic species" that appear identical but are genetically distinct.” Probably a good thing too, otherwise we'd have Monty Python killer rabbit-hares running amok armed with swords and whatnot whacking the bushes and our kneecaps.

European explorers were terribly cavalier at identifying Old and New World animals so there were bound to be mix-ups. Take our native North American hares, for example. Jackrabbits are not rabbits. Hares are larger, have longer black-tipped ears, large amber eyes, long hind legs, and are positively antisocial as compared to cuddly wabbits. They also tuck their tails down when they run—and they’re faster too, clocking in at 45MPH.

Despite its confusing common name, a jackrabbit is a hare. Short for jackass-(who looks like a)-rabbit. Got that? Of course, the word “jack” in front of rabbit, sort of like a Cousin Jack reference, as in being distantly related (not Cornish miners), was probably a nod to the fact that the explorers knew the New World creatures were hares. Jacks and Jills refer to hares, not rabbits.

On the other hand, a Belgian hare is not a hare, it's a true rabbit bred to look like a hare. A cottontail, on the other hand, really is a wabbit. Rabbits are social animals and make great pets. Think Peter Rabbit. Not anti-social Jack, or he'll smack the shit outta you. That goes for Jill too. Especially Jill.

According to H. L. Menken, "Zoologically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares." I guess he never saw a cottontail. Or perhaps fuzzy logic was involved. What he probably meant was there are no European rabbits (Oryctolagus) vs. native rabbits in America. Which is true as cottontails (Sylvilagus) are a separate species.

Rabbits and hares from the Leporidae family (not its sub-order, Genus), which is a sub-branch of the order Lagomorpha, which includes rabbits, hares and pikas (sometimes called rock hares). Got that? It's a Kings Played Chess On Fine Grain Sand ss moment... Order, Family, Genus, Species: it goes Lagomorpha, Leporidae. And that's where the semblance ends.

North and South American cottontail rabbits Sylvilagus are the ONLY rabbit that doesn't burrow, like the hare. They're sort of a straddle-the-difference species niche. They're not Old World rabbits. They're more rabbitish than rabbity, at this point, I'm probably splitting hares. Sylvilagus xx— (13 species) are not European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus—there can be only one!), starting with its tail, and its habits. But I'm not about to list all the burrowing/ feeding differences, let alone, weird kinetic skull differences. You'll have to look them up yourself hare. 

BTW, since I know you're dying to ask, cottontails (Sylvilagus) cannot interbreed with domestic European (Oryctolagus) rabbits. Though they can do the down and dirty, and even produce embryos, European rabbits have 22 pairs of chromosomes, while native wild cottontails have 21pairs of chromosomes. Score one for DNA! At least that gene pool's clean.

Sorcha Fragment

On a far distant isand on the other edge of the known world, a girl lay on a bright pile of mown hay, thinking of the tale the visiting seanchaí had told them around the hearth the night before. The sun drowsed her into that limnal state between waking and sleeping. The wind was like loose silk on her skin. She imagined it whispering—sometimes she could almost understand what it was saying. Something about Sorcha. A kingdom of light. Was it the wild geese flying overhead in a vee-formation that trapped her daydream in their net of air?

Irish Salmon

Wild hen turkey in downtown San Rafael police station parking lot. That's me and my blue shadow. "Isn't she lovely..." keeps trotting through my mind. And boy, can a turkey ever trot—they're world class sprinters along with emus and ostriches! I once clocked a turkey doing 30 MPH down MacArthur Blvd. in Oakland one foggy morning—I thought I was hallucinating, or my gallon of morning tea hadn't yet kicked in. Turkeys have made such a successful comeback, they've moved right into the suburbs along with the SUVs. I've seen toms take on red cars, chest-beating their own reflections on shiny car doors. Click on the turkey and click again on the second window to see her up close and personal. She really is lovely. She was a little nervous because I was following her and she crooned at me like a broody hen. I crooned right back. We crooned together. Small feminine moans of anxiety, reassurance and contentment.

Tomorrow's my birthday (Nov. 24) and I always get stood up by the damned turkey and everybody always forgets it's my birthday ...

Invariably, towards the end of Thanksgiving dinner, someone will suddenly remember and say—Hey, isn't it your birthday? and that's the end of it. No fuss, no muss, no cake—no prezzies either. Wow, what a long and winding anti-climax it's been.

To wit, I've adopted Thanksgiving dinner as my own personal feast. To mess with it, and go rogue with duck, goose, swan or ham instead of the Big Bird is not my idea of a good time.

And I won't even mention when folks go all crazy and adulterate the traditional Thanksgiving trimmings: instead of leaving well enough alone, and letting the integrity of the food offer its bounty to the palate, they fru-fru plain old cranberry sauce, and sweet potatoes.

This menu meddling disrupts my already fragile psyche. I don't want raw grated cranberries with orange rind, I don't want orange juice or HORRORS! marshmallows on my sweet potatoes. OK, so I don't mind garlic in the mashers. That's a good foodie addition. But make sure there's plenty of pan dripping gravy.

On Turkey Day (or any day), I really don't care about the current American food fad: the fear of fat fetish. 

Minute traces of fat don't make you fat, calories do—and your body really doesn't care where the calories come from. Despite the dietistas' magic potions and formulae, as a nation, we grow fatter, we grow fatter. Couch potatoes aside, carbs is carbs is calories. Besides, Thanksgiving Dinner clocks in at 5-6000 calories, and that's before your just desserts. Did you know that we have two stomachs on Thanksgiving? One for dinner, and another special one for dessert.

And on Thanksgiving, the only thing worse than adulterated stuffing with mountain oysters and cornbread, is no stuffing at all. I want real chestnuts in my stuffing, and I want a slab of my grandmother's three-tiered jello salad, like a wiggly UFO draped in the colors of an Irish flag: layers of lime & grapefruit, cream cheese studded with walnuts, and mandarin orange.

See, I want to stop time itself. I want to wear pitted olives on all ten fingers, wave my digits like a crazy olive-headed mob at a puppet show, and run wild with my cousins up the hill. I want to wait in anticipation for the turkey to come out of the oven—always later than expected, but the anticipation. Oh, the anticipation builds. For I drool, I drool.

I want my favorite cousin Ricky—who died too young—by my side. I had to give Ricky my new birthday-cum Christmas bike because he contracted polio—I was at cross purposes with myself because I loved him more than anything in the world. (Not that I had a choice.) But I was six, and newly in love for the first time with the shiny new red bicycle—replete with training wheels and multi-colored tassels on the sparkle handlebars. I no sooner saw, then it was gone.

I grabbed the handlebars lovingly and went, vroom-vroom, as they carted it off into the trunk of a waiting car. Somehow, I feel a vague having involuntarily given him that bicycle. Like I led him down the road to perdition. He was killed riding his Harley down 4th Street in Santa Rosa. A stuck throttle.

I want to go for a long birthday ride on my fast horse with my best friend Stephanie who also shared a Thanksgiving birthday. We were twinned a year and a day apart in age—Stephanie, me and my 2nd cousin Eddie—like in the fairly tales. They were my bookends, one on either side of me like pieces of bread on Leftover Turkey Friday and I was the filling. But, alas, that's all in the distant past. The cancer ate Stephanie's bones. My cousin has long since slipped down the slender neck of a bottle.

Birthdays serve to chronicle the inevitable march of time with the finality of a coffin nail—whether or not they're celebrated. Fear of death follows me even in my sleep. I never did learn to properly ride a bike. Maybe in heaven—or more like Purgatory. I had an interesting life. No goodie two-shoes for me!

See, with the profound disappointment of yet another missed birthday, I need all that feel-good tryptophan I can get buried in that turkey meat. No other meat has it. Nothing else will do. Tryptophan, tryptophan, we all scream for tryptophan. I will rage, rage against the dying of the light. Bring on the turkey. Bring it on, Jeeves. Turkey, Zoloft is thy middle name. Let the sun shine.

Unless, of course, salmon is introduced in sunset hues. Then I'm at cross purposes with myself and tradition. How does one properly choose between a healthy dose of tryptophan, vs. wisdom and knowledge? Not that salmon is being offered this Thanksgiving, mind you. But duck is, well, sacrilege...

My workaround is to go to three separate Thanksgivings and make up for the tryptophan shortfall. Talk about eat and run. My tryptophanic greed is like the primal urge of randy ducks who will attempt to nail just about anything their shape and size, including footballs. It's a Must Have Thing. Score a touchdown!

On my personal score card of 1 to 10, most carnal flesh rates in at around 3 or 4 (well, chateaubriand scores a 5—but, seriously, when do I ever see chateaubriand? Last time I had chateaubriand was in 1976 and I won't even mention sex) whilst the sunrisen flesh of fresh salmon rates 10+ on the scale! Go figure. I must've been born under the archaic Sign of the Salmon—fish of wisdom (vs tranquilizing turkey—BTW, a New World food!)

In Irish mythology, the Salmon was the first creature, the oldest being in the world, and he was the fish of wisdom—as he ate the hazelnuts of knowledge that fell into his vernal pool. Each red spot on his side represents a plucked hazelnut. The more flecks, the more profound his knowledge.

Note the Irish distinction between wisdom (críonnacht) & knowledge (fios). You have to gather discrete bits of knowledge to gain the kingdom, but you are either born with or without innate wisdom. And knowledge is next to useless without wisdom to frame it.

Don't know what that says about my passion for the fish. Eating wisdom? And you know what happens when I eat hazelnuts (anaphylaxis)! Death of knowledge? Oh, where is thy sting-aling? Breathe.

But look at what my great friend and artist in residence co-worker, Alex sent me from Da Bronx Farm! Now that's a great gift of art(ifice). I wonder if he added a little Wild Turkey to it as well? I envision it as a heavy, deep chocolate gateau (none of that cakemix fluff) with a chocolate truffle filling and a chocolate ganache icing. Guitard will do in a pinch. No Nutella filling, no hazelnuts, please!

© 2009 Alex Schapiro comix. Hire this guy to teach art, he's brilliant.

The Fo-Morians

Someone in my Irish in CA Yahoo group suggested the mythical Irish Formorians were Norsemen. Ummm.....that would be no, Formorians were not Norsemen. These mythical beings predated the Norsemen by at least an eon or twelve. Nor were they North men, as he suggested as a possible direct translation. Read on.

Scott, It is too easy to conflate the Irish mythic prehistoric past with the European historical past, and then try to to shoehorn it in to make sense of it through an Euro-centric (read: Anglo-Saxon) world view—which is often in direct conflict with Celtic world view—as history is always written in the tongue of the victor. Besides, mythic timelines rarely jive with historic timelines. It is best to read them with two (open) minds.

For starters, the majority of the ancient Irish tales were written down in Irish (not Latin) in the 12 to 14th centuries (though dating back much farther in language and structure to the 6th to 9th centuries) because of the impending threat of invaders, including Norsemen, threatened to disrupt the lineage of their oral history. The Norse rarely learned Irish, nor were they literate, so those Irish MSS would not have been available to them. But that's fodder for another sidebar.

Few 6-8th C. MSS survived, but many of the later MSS were copies of the earlier texts. We know this because of the grammar. Keep in mind, the 7th Venerable Bede was copying Irish Annals for his Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Who was Bede's translator, I wonder? Would have to be an Irishman.

Irish is one of the oldest living Indo-European (IE) languages, and Germanic, is among the newer additions to the IE tree.... Irish, a highly inflected language, has more in common with Tocharian A, than, say, Norse.

The ancient Irish tales themselves already existed long before there was any such thing as (Germanic) Norsemen (who are a much later cultural addition to the maps of Scotland and Ireland).

Of course, if my friend was gleaning from Seamus McManus, as source material, that might explain the oddball discrepancies...as he was a 19th c. Romantic"scholar" reshaping history as he saw fit. (By what information was archaeologically available at the time. Celtic studies has cone along way since McManus.) I read him (and Thomas Cahill) with several grains of salt. Make that a shaker full of salt!

It's a good idea to also read the actual medieval source material before making the assumption that the Firbolgs (Bag men Fir = man; bolg = bag) and Formorians (also spelled Fo-morians) were Norsemen. The Irish use an entirely different name for the Norsemen and they distinguish between them and the Danes. Can't remember the word. It was something like French Rat and Blue French Rat (Danes).

The Irish were already in Iceland BEFORE the Norsemen arrived there. And certainly many of the Norse Dubliners did settle Iceland, but by then they were more than half Irish to begin with, as their fathers took Irish wives. No need to take Irish and Pict slaves to Iceland to introduce Irish DNA... That would be coals to Newcastle. The Icelandic Genome project merely supports the Irish oral tradition that they too went to Iceland.

Read the Icelandic Laxdal Saga (written in medieval Icelandic ca. 1245 AD), and note that the young prince is half Irish, his mother having taught him Irish at the knee and when he sails back to Dublin, he speaks in Irish to his grandfather, the Dublin (Norse?) Irish king who thinks he wants to trade, not go to war. Note that he spoke Irish, not Norse.

As for the Lord of the Isles, that was its own separate wildcat kingdom, neither Norse nor, Scottish (nor Irish), and little known fact. Summerlin himself was either a quarter or half Irish (depending on the source) to boot.... So much for that Scottish Romantic idea of the pure old Norse strain existing in Scottish bloodlines...

It was never as simple as some armchair historians would make it out to be....and the dates of the actual Norse settlement in the West of Scotland are under four centuries... Couple that with the fact that they rarely brought Norse women with them, that leaves us with a very resiliant surviving Celtic population in the Isles with Norse political overlordship and structure. Same Celtic substratum paradigm holds true for the Isle of Man....

For example, Norse place names did not replace all the original Celtic place names. A significant fact: if the original Celts were all assassinated or run off, then Norse names would prevail. Place names are curiously persistent as long as there are surviving native speakers to say them. This strongly implies that the native speakers and Norse lived side by side long enough to learn each other's languages. Gaelic was spoken throughout the Isles until at least the 17-19th century.

Defining the word "Formorian" is a bit of a challenge. Note there is conflation/ confusion of the word mór—variously defined as terror/ phantom ( or it could mean big/large/great/high—mor) or the word for sea (muir; genitive mora) or it could even be moor. Besides, the word farraige is more often used for sea than muir.

Now as to spelling: we don't know if it's For-mor-ians or Fo-mor-ians. Or Fomoire, Fomóiri, Fomoraig, Fomhóraigh, Fomhoire, Fomorii, Fomor, Fomors, Fomoré, Fo-Muir, Foawr [Manx].

Fo- vs for-? Is this faoi? If it's a preposition, it's at the wrong end of the word. But I've seen this conjugation in Old Irish poems fo-. But Ro- also is used as a prefix. Then, shouldn't mór be (genitive) móir or (pl.) móra? Where is a linguist when I need him?

Note also how the much later the modern spate of historical confusion conflates the idea of Formorians with North sea folk... Now, if Formorians are from the North Sea as my friend suggests, remember the relative date when they were supposed to exist (read: during the Ice Age) so the idea of Northern lands (or Lochlainn) is a relative term.

Adjust your sights a bit farther south of the grand ice cap for the pre-Christian idea of north! In other words, Torey Island (Oileán Thúr Rí (King's Tower) Donegal) Dún Bhaloir (Balor's Fort) was considered to be the far North. A far cry from where we tend to place the current idea of Lochlainn (or the even later idea of Scnadanavia, for that matter).

Note also the Formorian uber-baddie, Balor is the (Zeus-ian) Lugh's grandfather. Now as a god, Lugh is the primo god of all Celtic nations from Ireland to Anatolia as is attested in principal place names of many European cities dedicated to Lugh: Lug(u)-dunum, Leiden, Lyon, Laon, Liegnitz, Loudon, Liegnitz, Léon, Dinlleu, and Luguvalium, aka Carlisle, etc.

The scattering of Formorian names are Celtic words... As is the word, Formorian. So linguistically, they're looking pretty danged Celtic to me. Lugh was supposed to have driven the Fomorians under the sea... or under something.

Now faoi (fo- in Old Irish) works here: faoi, preposition, meaning under, about. Faoi-mór-ians. Those (terrors) under the great/many (either really big or a lot of them)....or under (the sea—but remember. we're not so sure this word mór is the word for sea to begin with—it could also be transcribed as moor). Fomoorians sound more Cthulhonic, terrors driven underground vs the idea of North Sea men.

There is also an odd bit of historical conjecture that the (real) Formorians were among the original inhabitants of Ireland (probably Meso-Neolithic—in which case, if they were Old European, then they were probably not Celtic.)

Then you have to (un)read/unravel all the Biblical stuff out of the equation as that influence definitely was a medieval cultural bent, a band-aid slapped onto the archaic legends and myths to Christianize them.

Luckily the Irish monk scribes who transcribed the 11th c. Lebor Gabála were pretty transparent commentators when they cobbled on the Bible bits (and they were also pretty irritated that there was no mention of themselves in the Bible/Babel bits—so they fixed that slip-up as we all know that Irish itself was created out of the best bits of all the languages left over at the fall of the Tower of Babel! So they slapped that stuff right onto the old stories!) Luckily, it's relatively easy to remove the Noah-Ham-Japhet lineage accretions from the equation.

Remember also that during the 18th-19th cs. it was still a "scholarly" pastime (or cultural bias) to recreate and shoehorn in Biblical timelines with time present. Archaeology was becoming the rage but it wasn't yet a science. They bungled a lot of finds: Schliemann's pillage of classical Troy...

So a lot of modern historical "interpretation" and bad 19th c. archaeology needs to be weeded out from the prima materia as well. (PS Schliemann founded the Bank of Sacramento in 1851).

I tend to read the mythological cycle with a couple of timelines on hand, 1) when they were transcribed (current world views tend to taint the texts) and 2) when they were supposed to take place.

Hope this sheds some light, or gives you a jumping off place for further research.

COLUMBA’S CURE

King Bridei’s druid summoned up the wrath of the weather 

against Columba and so that the winds went against him. 

Loch Ness was an angry sea. No Christianity would land that day.
But Columba invoked Christ's name and sailed into the wind.

Christ is my druid, said Saint Columba, who sent a curse, an angel had struck the cup from Broichan’s hand. He fell gravely ill.
Word arrived and Columba sent a cure to King Bridei of Inverness.
He sent a charmed white stone from the mouth of the River Ness
as a cure to heal Bridei’s ailing druid, Broichan.
But only if he released the Irish slavegirl. When he finally said yes,
the white pebble floated to the top of the cup like a dove.
The moral victory of the cross is translated from the past, said Columba.
Briochan drank the water poured over the stone and was cured.
It is not known if he embraced Christianity or merely lost the power struggle,
it is clear they were cut from the same cloth. But he lived to see another day.
On the day King Bridei died, the stone returned to the mouth of the  river.

1/99 ( could be 12/ 98)
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