Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Re: The Prussian archives deliver again!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, this is interesting. I haven't found anything Preuss omitted from the published Suhm letters, but I do seem to have a different copy of one letter than the one he published: the one where Suhm congratulates Fritz on becoming king. Nothing seems bowdlerized, just different phrases are used to say the same thing, even beyond modernizing the spelling and grammar. I know that a lot of the time when someone's letters are published, there's the draft they made and kept in their own drawers, and then the one they sent, so there are multiple variants of some letters out there, or in many cases, only one survives. I'm not sure why Preuss and I are looking at different copies of this letter, but at least I know it's theoretically possible.

I also note that Fritz's response is written in very neat (better than Suhm's!) handwriting in the upper right hand corner of the Suhm letters, which makes me think that he handed the letter to a secretary and dictated the response. Actually, I seem to recall some historian (Hamilton?) saying that all his Suhm letters after he became king were written by secretaries, so, yeah, that's what it has to be.

I'm also disappointed that this batch from the archives doesn't include all the letters Suhm wrote during this period, just a selection. For instance, it doesn't include the final, dying letter!

Still, I'm getting the hang of his handwriting (it's not that bad once you get used to it, I just can't eyeball it), which is why I'm able to tell that what I have is not what Preuss wrote, so someday I might order all the Suhm letters in the catalogue and see if I can find any omitted goodies for salon.

Who has amazing handwriting, though, is sister Hedwig! (Or Hädevig, as she spells it.) I developed a theory with Peter Keith that when you're someone who doesn't normally write to the king, but you need to ask him for money or another favor, you use your absolute best penmanship, whereas if you're just chatting with the king (or calling him Alexander of the North, etc.), you use your whatever handwriting. So far, Peter, Nicolas, and Hedwig are bearing out this theory.

And if you're the king, you can write in "good luck figuring out what I mean" handwriting (seriously, the Hedwig letter has scribbled marginalia that I can barely make out a single character of), and if you work in the chancery or whatever it was called and write all day for a living, your handwriting degenerates in much the same way that flight attendant speak is one long garble telling you to buckle your seatbelt and check for emergency exits.

Anyway. My boss keeps telling me he will fight for me to get a month off work if I want one, but what I really want do with a month off work involves archival research in Germany and London, so I would first need to improve my 18C handwriting and spelling comprehension abilities, and honestly some more French and German reading comprehension, and some German listening comprehension would help, and of course no back pain, so I can sit in libraries and archives and read. And of course, my unwillingness to travel until Covid is much less of a thing, particularly Long Covid. So it might be a while. But just think how much fun it would be!

In the meantime, doing this much remotely and building up my skills slowly is fun. :D

Off to build up some Danish skills. No history yet, but fairy tales are getting noticeably easier!