Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 19

[cahn]

Yuletide nominations:

18th Century CE Federician RPF
Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria
Voltaire
Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Ernst Ahasverus von Lehndorff
Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802)
Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758)
Anna Amalie von Preußen | Anna Amalia of Prussia (1723-1787)
Catherine II of Russia
Hans Hermann von Katte
Peter Karl Christoph von Keith
Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf
August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758)

Circle of Voltaire RPF
Emilie du Chatelet
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson (Madame de Pompadour)
John Hervey (1696-1743)
Marie Louise Mignot Denis
Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis
Armand de Vignerot du Plessis de Richelieu (1696-1788)
Francesco Algarotti

Comments

Re: Wilhelmine bowdlerization

[mildred_of_midgard]

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.)

Auld Lang Syne

[selenak]

Also, in this particular case: the the Scots were in a situation where the last uprising had been violently quelled and the Highlander gear forbidden, where there was increasing anti-Scots and anti-Northern English feeing in the English south. (I mentioned the Boswell recorded incident when the returning from the 7 Years War soldiers from the Highlander Regiment get booed and hissed at in a London theatre with cries of "No Scots! No Scots!"; as they said to Boswell, "if these were French, could they have done worse?". Scots bashing was en vogue, not just by Tories like Johnson but also by liberal radicals like John Wilkes. (Because of Lady Mary's son-in-law, the PM Lord Bute, who was a Northerner and accused of sleeping with G3's Mom Augusta without any basis for this whatsoever other than G3 treating Lord Bute as a father figure. So if you were writing against the government, you more often than not did not just bash the PM but all Scots while you were at it.) Scots they were constantly told how much lesser they were, accused of being a burden on English tax payers and having nothing to compare to the great English cultural heritage. So the "discovery" of supposedly ancient Gaelic verses by a Scotsman that had nothing to do with Anglosaxon heritage was considered one big identity/heritage booster, too.

(Incidentally:remember George Keith giving Boswell his copy about an actual old Scottish epic about Robert the Bruce, to be read once a year? That's in this spirit, too.)

Just to show how things change just in a few decades, with Sir Walter Scott deserving much of the credit: with his novels, labelled as fiction and specifically his own fiction, he made Scottish history very popular in England. To the degree that when G4, the former Prince Regent, visited Scotland (first Hannover King to do so), Sir Walter Scott got him to wear a Highlander kilt. In public. A King of the House of Hannover, whose great uncle, Billy the Butcher Cumberland, had quelled the 45 uprising with war crimes, after which the wearing of kilts had been strictly forbidden. From this point onwards at the latest, Scotland wasn't the land of primitive boo-hiss worthy barbarians anymore, it was the romantic country of heroes, and of years yet two more decades later you get young Victoria and Albert building themselves a holiday home there, Balmoral, where the royal family holidays to this day, and the English singing Auld Lang Syne on New Year.

Re: Wilhelmine bowdlerization

[cahn]

:D I had actually heard of the Ossian fraud before (my history: I probably have not heard of whatever-it-is unless it involves Celtic literature in some way) but I had forgotten about it :) (But I know almost nothing about the Kalevala except that I have to read it at some point because The Raven Tower is based on it :P )