Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:

We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: MacDonogh Reread I

[mildred_of_midgard]

Schwedt brothers: have seen referred them to both as "rowdy", but don't recall any negative stories about Karl as opposed to older Schwedt, either, so I'm opting for confusion.

Were they brothers? Wikipedia has them as first cousins, at least if I've got the right individuals. (I might not.) It does say not to confuse Friedrich Wilhelm, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt (Sophie's husband) with his first cousin Margrave Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt, who was Karl's brother and had "Margrave" as a courtesy title.

...Thanks, 18th century.

Also, McDonogh proves he's bad at German, because that name is such a simple, literal pun and translation. Caesarion = little Caesar.

MacDonogh is bad at languages in general--heck, I got that wordplay without even knowing German, it's that straightforward--but I think what he's really bad at is Classics.

What I suspect is going on here is that he's never heard of Caesarion, just like he's never heard of Hephaestion, and he thinks it's a reference to a Caesar's (probably Julius or Octavian) height, hence "diminutive emperor." I seem to remember Octavian wearing platform sandals to appear taller (or being accused of doing same in propaganda), although it's probably giving MacDonogh too much credit for Classics knowledge to assume he even knows that.

And when I said "I'm not entirely sure Caesarion counts as an emperor" I was engaging in sarcastic understatement, because at one point I actually memorized the emperors up to Romulus Augustulus (and yes, that included a bunch of overlapping claimants, not all of whom got recognized by the Senate) and could recite their names off the top of my head, and I knew their major deeds and circumstances of death. I can no longer do that, but I can tell you Caesarion's not on anyone's list.

You and I are researching Fritz with the handicap of not knowing French literature; MacDonogh was researching him with the handicap of absolutely no Classics. (I'm skeptical he knows much about French literature either, but it's hard to know less than I do, so at least there's that.)

Tolkien would never have made that mistake, because

Because Tolkien knew languages, period. Yes, I know -ling from Old English too, because I got my PhD in dead languages, but it's also just not that hard!

That is interesting, if true. Not least because it would indicate either AW or Heinrich could have visited Fritz at Rheinsberg. Otoh, Charlotte married the Duke of Braunschweig in 1733, simultanous to the Fritz/EC marriage, and her and the Duke showing up at Rheinsberg is far more likely.

The other possibility I was imagining is Fritz & co. visiting Berlin, which we know at least he did every winter, and the siblings participating then and perhaps by correspondence as well. But it *is* possible they could visit Rheinsberg.

Then again, it's also possible FW wanted Fritz to invade Silesia, but I don't believe everything I read in MacDonogh. ;)

Interesting re Bielfeld. His letters in the volumes I've checked have dates and recipients, but then my volumes of Catt's memoirs have all these long speeches in quotation marks attributed to Fritz and the dates on which he's supposed to have said them, so Bielfield could be a novelist too.