sister is aizar (revisited)

May 23rd, 2013 by Mariska
aizar = sister (noun) (some things Google found for "aizar": an uncommon term: Aizar Schools in Pakistan; an unusual masculine first name; a rare last name; name of several gaming characters; Aizar S.L. is an air conditioning and heating company in Spain; similarly named Aizarna is a place in the Basque region of Spain)

Word derivation for "sister" :
Basque = ahizpa, Finnish = sisar
Miresua = aizar

My previous Miresua word for sister was ahisa.

The word sister appears in the first paragraph of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Two tools for conlangers

May 20th, 2013 by Cedh

I have done some Javascript coding recently. The results might be of interest to other conlangers, so I’m posting them here:

The Derivizer.
A simple tool that you can use while building/ expanding your conlang’s lexicon. You can enter (some of) your language’s root words and derivational affixes, and use this script to suggest a few random derivatives and/or compounds, for which you can then try to come up with nice idiomatic meanings. I’ve started writing this tool back in October 2012, and I’ve found it quite useful already. Of course, the exact degree of usefulness depends on the data you enter – I find it works best when you limit the input to a certain domain, e.g. only noun roots from a single semantic field, and only derivational affixes that can be attached to these nouns.

The Frequentizer.
I wanted to do a corpus-based phoneme frequency analysis for one of my conlangs today, but I couldn’t find a suitable online tool for this task in a quick round of googling, so I decided to write one myself. Even in the very first version, it can already (a) provide separate figures for vowels and consonants (and you can even define what counts as a vowel in your conlang), (b) handle user-defined di- and trigraphs correctly by treating them as single segments, and (c) arbitrarily combine different letters into a single phoneme, for instance accented and unaccented vowels. In a future version, the Frequentizer may also be able to assign the same grapheme to different phonemes depending on an orthographically predictable environment, but don’t hold your breath…

I hope these tools will prove useful to some of you. There’s not much documentation for either at this point, but I recommend taking a look at the example data (from Buruya Nzaysa btw) and testing some of the different settings in order to get a feeling for how they work. Have fun!

(Both of these are beta versions, so I can’t guarantee that the scripts always work as they should… ;) )

[EDIT May 23, 2013]
I have just uploaded a new version of the Frequentizer. There are now separate grapheme fields for consonants and vowels which both work like the old Special Graphemes field. You can also choose what to do with characters that don’t appear in those fields. And of course, the most significant change: The tool now has a basic understanding of syllable structure, so it can give separate statistics for onset and coda consonants. By default, it will treat the first consonant of every cluster plus all word-final consonants as belonging to a syllable coda; if you need different rules, you can add a syllable divider character (by default, the MIDDLE DOT ·) to your text corpus in places where the built-in rules do not give the intended syllabification.


Bird Myths, Pt. 5: Sinbad and the Rukh

May 20th, 2013 by Lorinda J Taylor
       In The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars (see the Prologue and first ten chapters here), I made Capt. Robbin Nikalishin a birder. What better qualification for the man who will head up the mission that encountered the first intelligent lifeform known to humanity -- and who happened to be big birds? During the mission out, there was a lot of boring downtime and one way the crew entertained itself was by telling bird myths, each crewmember telling tales from his or her own culture. Now, this section will be cut or drastically emended if I ever get that monster ready for publication, but I did too much research and had too much fun writing it to let it all disappear, so what better place to display it than on a blog devoted to myth in literature?
 
       The following passage continued Prf. Linna Katsopolos's narration.  She had just asked the crew, "Have any of you people ever heard of Sinbad?"  Some knew the tales, but many had not.  (Parenthetically, I saw a trailer last evening on the SyFy channel advertising an upcoming series called "Sinbad," so this post turns out to be quite pertinent!)
 

The Rukh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roc8954.jpg
(Public domain in the USA)

 
None of those who knew the tales objected to hearing them again and so Linna launched into her narrative.  “Back in the days of ancient Arbia, there was a young man named Sinbad, who was a merchant by trade and lived in the fabulous city of Bagda.  Bagda was actually a real city that existed for millennia, until it was wiped off the map during the 24th century depredations.  Sinbad is one of those resourceful trickster characters who are so common in folktales; he was always going on trade voyages to distant lands and getting into trouble.  So, during his second voyage it happened the ship put in at a deserted island for a while and Sinbad fell asleep under a palm tree.  When he woke up, there he was, alone!  The ship had sailed off without him!  He fell into despair, for he had no food or other provisions and he felt he would surely die there.
“Presently, however, he began to explore his surroundings and he climbed a tree to get a better look.  And off in the distance he saw a great white dome.  Heartened by what he thought was a human habitation, he made his way toward it, only to be disappointed and perplexed.  It turned out to be a full fifty paces in diameter but completely smooth and lacking any evidence of windows or doors.
“At that moment the sky went dark, even though it was a cloudless day.  Looking up, Sinbad was horrified to see an enormous bird flying down toward him, big enough to block the sun with its wings … yes, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Suddenly Sinbad remembered tales he had heard of the rukh and how it kills elephants to feed its young, and it dawned on him that this white dome was actually a rukh’s egg!  And indeed the giant bird settled down upon the dome-egg and began to brood it.  It had not even noticed Sinbad, who must have appeared to it as insignificant as an ant to an eagle.
“Presently night came on and the rukh went to sleep.  Sinbad got an idea, so he took off his turban – that long piece of cloth that people from that part of the world sometimes wind around their heads – and used it to tie himself to the leg of the rukh … right, Avi, just like the hero did in your tale!  In the morning the bird rose up and flew away.  It carried Sinbad to the top of a pinnacle, where he untied himself and dropped off.  The bird then seized a giant snake as prey and flew away.  Shades of Garuda!
“Sinbad immediately began to look around and he discovered that he was boxed in by impassable mountains.  He began to wish he had stayed on the island, where at least a ship might have come by.  A deep valley spread out below him and, when he descended to it, he found the ground paved with diamonds!  And then all of a sudden the skinned carcass of a sheep fell to the ground near him from the heights above, and he recollected a story he had heard – how in the Mountains of the Diamonds, the jewels are inaccessible, and so the people throw down the flesh of slaughtered animals, to which some of the diamonds adhere.  Then they wait for vultures to come and seize the carrion in their talons and carry it back to the heights above, where the people drive off the birds and collect the gems.”
Robbie interrupted.  “Now, no good natural historian came up with this tale, because unlike eagles vultures have very weak feet and couldn’t possibly pick up something as large as a sheep carcass.  They would simply have eaten it on the spot.”
“Now, Robbie,” scolded Linna, “don’t lose the spirit and go all scientific on us!”
“Sorry,” said Robbie cheerfully.  “I’ll just regard the bird as some imaginary raptor!  Please do go on, Professor.”
Linna cleared her throat.  “So Sinbad filled his pockets with diamonds and then bound himself beneath one of the carcasses, and sure enough a … yes, I’m going to say ‘vulture’! … came along and carried the meat and the man up to the top of the cliff!  There, people were waiting to harvest the gems and you can imagine how astonished they were to see a man crawl out from under the carrion!  Of course, Sinbad went on to sell the diamonds and become rich, whereupon he returned to Bagda and lived a comfortable life.
“That wasn’t the last of his voyages, however, or of his encounters with the rukh.  During his fifth voyage, his ship stopped at a different island.  While the crew disembarked to draw water and explore, Sinbad remained on board.  Presently, someone ran to him in great excitement, calling him to come and see what they had found.  ‘We thought it was a dome, but it seems to be an egg!  The men are breaking it even now!  We can have a feast!’ 
The merchants break the egg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sinbad_the_Sailor_(5th_Voyage).jpg
(Public domain)


“Well, Sinbad knew exactly what they had found and he knew they were making a disastrous mistake.  He rushed out, but he was too late.  The fluid had already poured out, revealing a immature rukh, which the men were about to butcher.  And at that moment the sun was once again darkened as the parent circled above them.  Naturally, it was highly incensed at the destruction of its egg.  It shrieked to call its mate, and soon there were two giant birds bearing down upon the hapless sailors.
“The men rushed madly for the ship and put off from the island while the infuriated birds pursued them.  But then the rukhs disappeared and the ship, beating rapidly out into the open ocean, appeared to be safe.  But not so – the birds had only gone away to pick up big boulders in their claws.  The male rukh’s stone missed the dodging ship, but the female’s stone landed on the stern and broke the rudder, and the ship sank to the depths of the sea.
“However, like all the Sinbad tales, this one has a happy ending – our hero was able to swim to land, and ultimately he garnered even more riches for himself and returned home to live contentedly until his next adventure.  And so comes the end of my narration …   Don’t you all make those disappointed noises – our purpose is to tell bird tales, and there are no more birds in Sinbad’s story.  If we complete every tale no matter what, we’ll be here for the whole thousand and one nights!”
“All right, Professor, I’ll concede that!” said Robbie.  “So – now we know all about the rukh, and it seems to be a lot like Lt. Oman’s Ziz bird.  That just leaves us with Lt. Brokenbow’s story.  Have you got anything that can match all these others, Howie?”
 
Coming next:
Native American Bird Myths 
 
But first we'll learn something about the
Aboriginal Ammeriken Enclave

Tȳni Trēsi

May 20th, 2013 by David J. Peterson

Didn’t I tell y’all there would be some Dothraki this season? Ta da! There it is!

If I may come to things out of order, I thought the VFX of the White Walker dying were outstanding. Must be pretty satisfying to stab something and then have it turn to ice, fall and shatter that way. Pretty cool! Of course, Sam should’ve retained his knife (what was he so afraid of? He killed it! No way you can come back from that!), but the action north of the wall has been replete with horror movie tropes, so it is fitting. For those who remember the specific action of the book better than I do, though, what was up with those birds?! I don’t remember that from the book. And why would they have been so excited about this encounter as to opposed to the others that we’ve seen in the series already? There were no crows in those scenes (or, at least, no literal crows). Oh, and one more question: Isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that that White Walker is the exact same White Walker we saw in the season 2 finale?

I thought the scenes surrounding and during Tyrion and Sansa’s wedding were done very well. Reading those scenes initially, it was so frustrating how much Tyrion wants to convey to Sansa that he’s not a bad guy, and how miserably he fails to do so. I thought they captured that aspect of the books quite well in the scenes we saw here.

There has been a bit of controversy in some corners regarding the scenes on Dragonstone. I would like to go on record saying I thought they were fine. I have no complaints, and found everything to be in keeping with what ought to have been expected.

In today’s scene from Slaver’s Bay, we’re introduced to Daario Naharis, who looks nothing like I thought he would. You know who does look cool, though: Prendahl na Ghezn (played by Ramon Tikaram). Dude looks awesome! He’s even got the blue hair! (If there was any glare on your screen, you might not have noticed it, but his hair was dyed blue, I can assure you.) Alas, his role is a bit short-lived… It’s too bad. Honestly, I hope I see more of him in some other feature. He looks like a leading man, to me.

The main scene begins with Mero leading Prendahl and Daario into Dany’s tent. There is an exchange where Mero is even more insulting than Kraznys, and he provokes the incredible, invincible and indomitable Jacob Anderson, a.k.a Grey Worm, a.k.a Torgo Nudho, who says:

  • Nya dare, beza unehtelas jaa engo ozy?
  • “My queen, shall this one slice out his tongue for you?”

And for those keeping track, yes, that is a Dothraki-style hiatus there with jaa, in addition to Dothraki-style post-vocalic h in unehtelas, both of which he nails, because Jacob Anderson is a Golden God.

Anyway, Dany responds in High Valyrian:

  • Bisi vali īlvyz zentyssy issi.
  • “These men are our guests.”

The word vali was cut due to length, I’m guessing, but the result would still be grammatical (it would just mean “These ones [probably animate] are our guests”). If the form of the possessive adjective looks odd to you, then you’re really keyed in to the phonology of High Valyrian. As I mentioned somewhere at some point in time, adjectives in High Valyrian have a different form depending on whether they come before or after the noun they modify. In this case, the full form would be īlvyzy. The final y drops out if the adjective precedes the noun it modifies, though, and the z devoices unless the next word begins with a voiced sound. Since “guests” is zentyssy, then, the form of the adjective is īlvyz and not īlvys.

After many more insults and a scene between the three Second Sons, we see Missandei bathing Daenerys. Though this scene was, of course, planned, this bit of dialogue was added by Dan Weiss very late in the game (he asked for the translation in mid-September). Personally I think it’s kind of a meta joke since this is literally the only Dothraki that appears in the entire season. What he did was he gave me the English line and asked if I could get athjahakar (the Dothraki word for “pride”) at the end of the sentence. Ultimately this is how I did the translation:

  • Zhey Drogo ast me-Dothraki thasho h’anhaan ven anha ray yol mehas. Me azh maan atjakhar.
  • “Drogo said I spoke Dothraki like one born to it. It gave him great pride.”

Those who know Dothraki will note that this line features the (somewhat) rare invocative use of zhey (i.e. bringing to the listener’s attention a person who hasn’t yet appeared as a topic of discussion). You’ll also note that athjahakar is misspelled. Indeed, this little exchange was supposed to reveal that Dany was never as good at Dothraki as she is, of course, with High Valyrian or Common. And the specific word is a call-back to episode 103, I think it was, where Dany’s handmaiden Jiqui (or Zhikwi) Irri is shown teaching Dany Dothraki by teaching her to say the word athjahakar.

Looking at the above Dothraki line, you’ll note that Dany mangles it pretty badly. That was the intention, but personally I think Emilia went a little too far. Neither Dany nor Emilia was ever that bad! Of course, if Dany hasn’t really been speaking Dothraki much, I can see her getting out of practice (perhaps Jorah is the only one that speaks to the Dothraki now [or, actually, now Missandei can too]). She puts together a rather grammatically complex sentence, though. Pretty impressive for a second language learner!

Second Sons was a little light on language, so to add some girth to this, here’s the full declension for vala, the High Valyrian word for “man”:

Case Singular Plural Paucal Collective
Nominative vala vali valun valar
Accusative vale valī valuni valari
Genitive valo valoti valuno valaro
Dative valot valoti valunta valarta
Locative valā valoti valunna valarra
Instrumental valosa valossi valussa valarza
Comitative valoma valommi valumma valarma
Vocative valus valis valussa valarza

Oh, also I wanted to mention that the word for “son” from our title comes from Twitter user @Tracee2ez, who was my 3,000th Twitter follower! The word is trēsy, which is nicely symmetrical with the word for “daughter”, which is tala. Both are lunar words, but tala is first declension, and trēsy second. There are a number of dualities that work this way, where two words which are intended to be in some sort of semantic relation to one another differ either solely in declension class or gender, but in systematic (or semi-systematic) ways. This word, then, turned out to be quite the fortuitous coining, since I already had the word for “daughter”.

Also, for those in the Bay Area, I will be at BayCon this Sunday. If you’re in the area, stop by and say M’ath!

Oh, and one more also (consider this a public service announcement): The penultimate episode of this season of Game of Thrones will not be airing a week from yesterday! I guess due to a ratings slump on Memorial Day, HBO is skipping a week, and episode 309 will air on June 2nd. Perhaps I can put together a post next week trying to answer some questions. Or I can take a break and enjoy the weekend. We’ll see.

Fonas chek!

Announcement: Going on Hiatus

May 20th, 2013 by Conlangery Podcast
We’ll be back mid-to-late June.

cona

May 19th, 2013 by Cedh

Let’s have a word of the day from Tmaśareʔ:

cona (v.) ‘promise, swear, vow’

Natohnęʔ kwe na conapǫkse otweʔną hąse enętaʔi yaśe.
na-tohną-eʔ kwe na-Ø cona-pǫ-kse otweʔną hąse-Ø eni-ɴta-ʔi yaśe-Ø
1SG.POSS-father-ERG but 1SG-ABS promise-SENS-3>3.VII next_year horse-ABS be_equipped_with-1SG>3.II-IRR PROX.VII.SG-ABS
“But my father has promised me that I will get a horse next year!”

cona is a ditransitive verb with three mandatory arguments, which has the interesting implication that you cannot simply say that you promise something, but you always have to say who you’re promising it to.

The word also has a fascinating etymology: It is ultimately derived from the Proto-Western root *dzači ‘say, speak’, extended with the adjectival prefix *dłũ- ‘long’, i.e. ‘say something which will be valid for a long time’. (There’s a precise cognate in Empotleʔá tlonátsé.) After several centuries of sound change, the reflex of this verb had become */tsonatʃi/ – and at that point, people started dropping the last syllable of the stem. Why? Well, a verb like ‘promise’ is very frequently used in the first person with future reference, that is, indicating a self-commitment along with a wish that one may be able to live up to this self-commitment. This wish may very well be made explicit by inflecting the verb for the optative mood, similar to how English speakers might add ‘want’ as in ‘I want to promise you…’. And as it happens, Tmaśareʔ has an optative suffix whose form is exactly the same as the last syllable of the regular reflex of *dłũ-dzači, namely -ći (itself derived from the Proto-Western verb *čiye ‘want’). It is no surprise that some confusion arose, and in the end the /tʃi/ syllable was left off when the verb was used in non-optative circumstances, leading to reanalysis of the stem as just /tsona/.


map is mata

May 19th, 2013 by Mariska
mata = map (noun) (some things Google found for "mata": a very common term; an uncommon last name; Mata Hari was the stage name of a Dutch exotic dancer and spy (in Indonesian matahari means sun, literally "eye of the day"); MATA is an acronym for Memphis Area Transit Authority; a unusual to uncommon first name that can be feminine; Mata is a 2006 Kannada movie; means eye in Fijian, Indonesian, Maori, Samoan, Tagalog, Tahitian and Tongan; forms of the verb matar which means to kill in Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Portuguese; in Spanish means bush, shrub; in Swedish means to feed; name of places in Brazil, Portugal, Spain and Iran)

Word derivation for "map" :
Basque = mapa, Finnish = kartta
Miresua = mata

Some Miresua nouns end in A, no getting around it, because the Basque and Finnish words both end in A.

The word maps occurs in paragraph six of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

window is ileku (revisited)

May 15th, 2013 by Mariska
ileku = window (noun) (some things Google found for "ileku": an uncommon to unusual term; user names; similar Oleku is the title of an apparently popular Afrobeat song by Nigerian rapper Ice Prince; Ileku (or Eleku) is the name of a stream in the Democratic Republic of the Congo)

Word derivation for "window" :
Basque = leiho, Finnish = ikkuna
Miresua = ileku

My previous Miresua word for window was naihe, which was, in my opinion, a peculiar alphabetic scramble.

I checked, the word window does appear in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Kaponii ba sandi, utora keei — Sandic dictionary, third edition.

May 14th, 2013 by Aaron
 Well, I'm happy.  I finally got un-lazy for long enough to finish the dictionary!  I'm only a month late in publishing it, but you know what they say- better late than never!  I won't provide a link here, since I'm not really trying to advertise it.  If you go to lulu.com and search "kaponii ba sandi", it's there.  Isn't that "ba" on the cover just awesome?  I wrote it with water in sand one day when I went to the park.  I love seeing "ba"s out in the wild, so to speak. :)

I'm just happy that I'll have a new edition of the dictionary finally!  Things were so cramped in the old one, and I'm looking forward to free-range work again.    I have to stop sometimes and think about just how fortunate I am to live in 2013, where ordering a printed version of my dictionary is literally as easy as clicking a few buttons on a screen.

I remember when I first started conlanging, that it would take hours and hours to re-copy the dictionary into a fresh book each time.  And because I maintained two separate dictionaries for Sandic (one english-sandic, one sandic-english), of course there were inconsistencies between them.

Nowadays, I spend two days completely reformatting it at my leisure if I should so desire, plug the new words into a spreadsheet, auto-alphabetize (alphabetization was always my bane) and then I'm ready to go!  So easy.  I have no idea why I waited so long to do this!

Now to get cracking on that anthology!

(Oh, also.  There is totally a link on the right-hand side, if you want to look at what the dictionary is like! :D  It's a big pdf (like 200 pages), but everything is there. :) )

The Cross and the Sword, by Evangeline Walton: Analysis

May 13th, 2013 by Lorinda J Taylor
       People may know that Evangeline Walton is one of my favorite authors.  I set out some time ago to write analyses of the four volumes of the Mabinogion Tetralogy and so far I've succeeded in covering only Prince of Annwn, the First Branch.  Now I've read a book of Walton's that I had missed earlier, The Cross and the Sword, a historical novel that deals with the conflicts between the English and the Norsemen in the 10th and 11th centuries -- events leading up to the reign of the Danish King Knut. It was a tempestuous period, when Christianity was trying to establish itself in the world of Odin-men, feeling its way along a tentative path and not doing such a good job of living up to its own principles. 
 
       This tale is every bit as powerful as Island of the Mighty, but it's far less well known.  I was puzzled to find a whole slew of 3-star rankings on Goodreads (and even one 2-star) because I can't imagine giving it less than 4 and of course personally I give it 5.  However, I think that's because this isn't an easy book.  People may buy it expecting it to be light bedtime reading or popular entertainment -- airheaded sword-and-sorcery with romanticized, plastic heroes and heroines, simplistic villains, and maybe even knights fighting dragons.  If that's your preference in reading matter, don't bother with this book.
 
       In fact, it's a dark, meaty tale that requires the reader's full attention.  It's fraught with profound themes, its style is strenuous, and its diction is not easy.  It has enough violence to please the most calloused aficionado of barbaric battle tales, but underlying the brutality is a question:  Why does such violence have to exist?
 
       One thing that makes reading this book difficult is the names.  There is a plethora of characters and most of their names begin with the letter "E"!  The author had no control over this -- she's writing about real historical figures, and all the English kings and warriors of the period had names like Edmund, Edgar, Edwy, Ethelred, Edric, Edward -- and women ... Edith, Elfgiva, Emma, Elfryth ... well, you get the point.  Then there are the Danes.  There are two different Sweyns -- our protaganist Sweyn Haraldsson and Sweyn Forkbeard, the Danish King -- and at least two different Olafs.   Even the surnames can be confusing --  Sweyn Forkbeard and Harald Firebeard, for example.
      Fortunately, the author provides a genealogical table of the English Kings and also a list of characters at the beginning of each of the three sections of the book.  Prepare to consult these frequently!  This is a surmountable difficulty, however, and shouldn't deter you from relishing the book.
 
        A second problem the casual reader might encounter is the pithy style.  The dialogue is written in a semi-archaic, slightly formalized style that could be off-putting if you aren't prepared to pay attention.  Personally, I found it highly effective.  I get annoyed at period fiction or high fantasy where the characters talk in 21st-century colloquialisms, and I think by adjusting word order and attending to diction Walton achieves an appropriate archaic effect.  Let me give an example.
      
       " 'And so he is enraging them by raising up kinless men like this duke Leofsy of Essex?  Stirring up trouble in his own house while I am knocking at the door?'  Forkbeard yawned.  'The more fool he.  When I am King of the English I will love those great lords like brothers until the land is quiet -- then each will find himself a head shorter.'
       " 'Glad I am to have only the love you give a foster-brother, King!'  Palli laughed shortly."  (p. 146 of the Ryerson hardback edition)

       One additional word concerning language, something I generally think about.  The languages being spoken in this book are never discussed -- everyone speaks the same.  Actually, the English have to be speaking Anglo-Saxon and the Norsemen Old Norse or some variation thereof.  I really don't know what lingua franca the Norseman and the English used to communicate during the period of invasion -- surely not Latin -- but Walton chooses not to make it an issue.  I agree with that -- such pedantry would have merely been a distraction from the serious intent of the book.

       So now we get to the heart of the book, its themes and purpose.  It is a study in the Christianity and culture of the time, and to some extent a commentary on the Christianity and culture of today.  But it's also a study in what it means to be human, revealed through the main character and narrator, the Norwegian Sweyn Haraldsson.  Walton took a few terse references from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and weaves a credible fictional tale around these bare-bones remarks, building a fully developed character who fits seamlessly into the larger context.  We follow Sweyn on a quest from his beginnings as the son of Harald Firebeard in a culture of Odin-worship, which could be brutal and violent but which was honest, true to its beliefs, and decent to its own people, if not to others.   We follow him to England where he encounters Christianity and isn't impressed, especially by the doctrine that dooms all men to burn in hell if they don't accept Christ.  The Christianity of the time was fraught with hypocrisy and had not yet learned how to live what it preached.  Sweyn converts (becoming Edwy the Dark) but not with any spiritual conviction -- it is merely that if he wants to marry the woman he has fallen in love with, he has to have been baptized.  We see the results of Christian hypocrisy when some of the few Christians who are sincere in their beliefs in loving and caring for their fellow human beings are brutally murdered in the St. Brice's Day Massacre.  Afterwards, Sweyn becomes Black Thrym, one of the worst marauders and slaughterers of the English, even while hating himself for his own dark deeds.  He sees those deeds as the only means to gain vengeance on the man who perpetrated the massacre.  Ultimately, an act of sacrifice -- the martyrdom of Elfeah -- causes him to experience an almost miraculous revelation of what God is really all about.

       "This man was good, so goodness was.  He was dying as he said his Master had died, to save others.  Such goodness could be.  It was.  No mistake in men's minds, that were too small to understand it, no doctrine, or folly or ugliness, could cloud it.  What were mistakes, or suffering, in the goodness that was eternity?  For eternity must be, because goodness was, and therefore justice must be." (p.281)

       It's interesting to contrast the presentation of Christianity in this book with that in Prince of Annwn.  In both books the consignment to hell of anyone who does not profess faith in the Christian god forms a major discussion point.  But where the treatment of Christianity flounders in Prince of Annwn and keeps being restated as if the author is never quite satisfied with her rendition, the pithy style of The Cross and the Sword serves the subject well.  Frequent striking, almost aphoristic remarks encapsulate the attitude toward Christianity, and character development serves to give the depiction flesh.

       I must say a word about Chapters 10 and 11, which present what has got to be one of the most mesmerizing descriptions of horrific slaughter ever written.  When you read about Evangeline Walton, she seems like such a mannerly, sensitive, kind, and compliant person and yet she was able to write about such visceral violence with only the barest modicum of sentimentality, never pulling any punches.   It's an absolute tour-de-force.  We see the destruction of the characters whom I consider to be the true heroes of the piece, as they live out a brutal affirmation of their beliefs.

       Unfortunately, this book is out-of-print, but maybe that's a good thing.  I have occasional correspondence with Douglas Anderson, the current editor of Evangeline Walton's works (she left a quantity of unpublished manuscripts) and he told me that The Cross and the Sword was hacked up by the publisher, who chopped out whole paragraphs and pages.  The publisher also changed the author's title, substituting this generic phrase The Cross and the Sword that could fit anything from a Roman gladiator tale to a Crusader novel to a story of the Knights Templar.  (Why publishers insist on doing that is beyond me!)  A new edition is in the works and it likely  will appear under the author's chosen title: Dark Runs the Road.  That phrase appears near the end of the book, as part of a cautionary statement:

       "I have nothing to complain of.  I have lived my life; known goodness as well as evil, joy as well as sorrow.  I wish for nothing save that I might have made the world a little better place before I left it.  Such a world as men like Elfeah and Eric might have built.  But it is the Knuts and the Olafs and the Ethelreds who get to be rulers of men.  Dark runs the road ahead of mankind and womankind that are yet to be; dark as it ran before me." (p.300)

       If in its present garbled state this book is still such a treasure, imagine how great it will be when it can be read the way the author intended it!