As to the bowlderization: honestly? I suspect the non-prudery cuts were because some editor at the English publisher's said: Nobody knows who these people are anymore anyway, these memoirs are getting read because of the Fritz related stuff, so cut down the rest where you can.
You'd think, but if so, why did they cut a reference to Fritz (being godfather to his niece) in favor of reams and reams of intrigues between obscure people that I've been slogging through the last few days, and that are the reason that cahn and I never made it all the way through volume 2 in English? I decided to read this in German right now solely because the only way I will ever force myself to read volume 2 line by line is if I'm getting language practice out of it. :P
This wasn't as far fetched as it sounds; in the 18th century, faked memoirs of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV's mistress and morganatic wife, were published, and it took a while until they were identified as false...Also, there was the famous Ossian fraud. So you could forgive people reacting to "check out the memoirs of Frederick the Great's favourite sister, making her entire family sound nuts!" with "aha, forgers strike again!"
Yep!
Ossian fraud: cahn, this was a collection of poems on ancient Irish mythology (Oisín, the son of Finn McCool) that were published in the mid-18th century by a Scottish guy, who claimed they were from ancient manuscripts he found, but he would never produce. A *huge* debate raged on whether they were real or whether he made them up. Consensus: there was no manuscript, the poetry was 18th century, the material was based on oral traditions that were older.
This is not unlike what happened with the Kalevala, except Lönnrot, though he may have underreported the extent of his own involvement in composition, never claimed he had an ancient manuscript, but actually said he was collecting older songs and working them into a single national epic. Disclaimer: I am not an expert on the Kalevala and am only reporting what I've read: although he acknowledged turning multiple oral songs into a written single epic, he may have invented more than he let on.
At any rate, if the Ossian guy (*googles* MacPherson) had acknowledged what he was doing instead of trying to pass it off as an ancient manuscript, there wouldn't have been this big controversy and we wouldn't be using the word "fraud"! And people would have told him he was a good poet, but no, he wanted to claim antiquity. (Which tells you something about society's priorities: people want folklore and mythology to be really old.)
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Re: Wilhelmine bowdlerization
Date: 2020-10-13 12:58 am (UTC)You'd think, but if so, why did they cut a reference to Fritz (being godfather to his niece) in favor of reams and reams of intrigues between obscure people that I've been slogging through the last few days, and that are the reason that
This wasn't as far fetched as it sounds; in the 18th century, faked memoirs of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV's mistress and morganatic wife, were published, and it took a while until they were identified as false...Also, there was the famous Ossian fraud. So you could forgive people reacting to "check out the memoirs of Frederick the Great's favourite sister, making her entire family sound nuts!" with "aha, forgers strike again!"
Yep!
Ossian fraud:
This is not unlike what happened with the Kalevala, except Lönnrot, though he may have underreported the extent of his own involvement in composition, never claimed he had an ancient manuscript, but actually said he was collecting older songs and working them into a single national epic. Disclaimer: I am not an expert on the Kalevala and am only reporting what I've read: although he acknowledged turning multiple oral songs into a written single epic, he may have invented more than he let on.
At any rate, if the Ossian guy (*googles* MacPherson) had acknowledged what he was doing instead of trying to pass it off as an ancient manuscript, there wouldn't have been this big controversy and we wouldn't be using the word "fraud"! And people would have told him he was a good poet, but no, he wanted to claim antiquity. (Which tells you something about society's priorities: people want folklore and mythology to be really old.)