The Wonders of the WWW

or How to Spend a Profitable Afternoon. (It’s still raining)

What started me off I no longer know.  I remember I was idly looking for poetry by Wilhelm Busch, to enliven a meeting of the German Conversation Group next week.  Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) was a German humorist, poet, illustrator and painter. He published comic illustrated cautionary tales from 1859; the one most people know is the tale of Max Und Moritz, a Rascals’ History in Seven Tricks:

Ah, how oft we read or hear of

boys we almost stand in fear of.

For example, take these stories

of two youths, named Max and Moritz

. . . . . . .

Busch was a wise old bird and I enjoyed my trip down memory lane. How Busch led to Tannhauser I have no idea now, but Tannhauser was the next port of call. I am frequently surprised that the obscure subjects which interest me can be found on the internet at all;  I am duly grateful, nevertheless.

Wagner’s Opera Tannhauser is well-known; I wasn’t after Wagner, I was after the legend on which Wagner based his libretto. Tannhauser was a knight who,  based on his Bußlied, (song of atonement) became the subject of legend. The story makes Tannhäuser a knight and poet who found the Venusberg, the subterranean home of Venus, and spent a year there worshipping the goddess. Not from afar, either. As these things go, he duly became aware of his sinful behaviour, left the Venusberg, asked Pope Urban for forgiveness but was told that forgiveness was as likely as it would be for the papal staff to burst into blossom. Which it promptly did, it’s a legend, after all. But Tannhauser had already gone back to ground with Venus and was never seen again.

Tannhauser wasn’t only a legendary figure, he was an active courtier at the court of Frederic II in the 13th century,as I found when I clicked on a learned text, the Codex Manesse, the single most comprehensive source of Middle High German Minnesang poetry. The manuscript is famous for its colourful full-page miniatures, one each for 137 minnesingers.The Codex was compiled in the first half of the 14th century and lists the names of Minnesingers of the mid 12th to early 14th century, Tannhauser among them. (How he became the stuff of legend is not immediately apparent. I expect somebody somewhere knows but I’d have to go on clicking for a lot longer to find out.) The Codex itself has had a very turbulent destiny, having changed ownership in many wars, disputes, a succession of rulers and even for filthy lucre at times. Now it’s back in its spiritual home of the University Library of Heidelberg.

The www is a wonderful tool, but rather lonely. Beloved and I used to do this sort of journey of exploration via books in the old days; ending up with piles of them, each reference leading to another, until books and time ran out. So, come suppertime, I told him of my researches and we instantly fell into the old habit, minus the pile of books. Wagner’s Tannhauser came first, Beloved being knowledgable about opera, but then we went off at a tangent, confusing Tannhauser with Lohengrin, who is a character in German Arthurian literature. The son of Parzival (Percival), he is a knight of the Holy Grail sent in a boat pulled by swans to rescue a maiden who can never ask his identity. His story, which first appears in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, is a version of the Knight of the Swan legend known from a variety of medieval sources. Wolfram was a German knight and poet, regarded as one of the greatest epic poets of his time. As a Minnesinger, he also wrote lyric poetry. (The miniature is taken from the Codex Manesse, as is the one of Tannhauser above.)

Naturally Elsa, the maiden whom Lohengrin rescued and who became his wife, asked after his origin, which made Lohengrin take up boat and swan and disappear back down the Rhine, never to return.

We hadn’t quite finished with our exploration; having been to Kleve (Cleves) and the Schwanenburg with the tower from which the legendary Elsa espied her knight in shining armour floating down the Rhine to rescue her, we briefly revisited our memories of the trip but soon got back to more ancient times, i.e, Anne of Cleves, the Flanders Mare, who became Henry VIII 4th wife from January to July 1540. They clearly didn’t hit it off and the marriage was speedily annulled. Holbein’s painting of her is said to be more flattering than realistic.

Having arrived at Henry VIII, about whom we know far too much to feel the slightest interest in exploring him further than in theatrical plays on the stage, we finally gave up.

I had a lovely time, we both did. I even enjoyed writing this post.

I Wouldn’t Call It Research, Exactly . . . .

If anybody checked my Google searches they’d either have a fairly detailed picture of me quite quickly or they’d get a headache. With one half of Europe (the populations of the countries involved) disgusted and the other half (the governments of said countries) declaring themselves innocent of all knowledge of nefarious deeds by the NSA/CSS,  I fell to wondering how the secret services tell friend from foe.

I actually googled ‘security services’ and came up with reams of sites and pages and pages of newspaper articles on the recent scandals. Will this curiosity now put me on the list of suspect individuals? I’m probably there already because I carelessly said in a comment that, as far as I’m concerned, whistleblowers like Edward Snowden deserve a prize for bravery.  It beggars belief that vast resources are used to amass, sift, evaluate and store all the rubbish that floats about the world wide web. Every email, tweet, FB update, blogpost, etc. of millions of people is studied electronically.

It’s impossible to put the genie of the internet back in the bottle; whatever would we do without it. Personally, I find the internet a good thing, it is enriching my life quite miraculously. But, having made these remarks electronically, I have the uncomfortable feeling that somebody somewhere might now consider me a threat to national security.

However, be that as it may, my real googling activities are nothing to do with spooks and how they are out to get me, but a lot with cooking, literature, gardening, etymology, birds, plant names and what’s in the news locally.

Here’s a small selection from last week:

Imperial Rome in the 1st Century AD  
Reading a history of the emperors of the period, as well as going to see Shakespeare’s gory play ‘Titus Andronicus’ who is absolutely nothing to do with the historical emperor Titus.

Wasabi Chocolate
I bought a bar, to see ‘what it tastes  like’ . It’s disgusting stuff, I’m going to throw it away.

AM Homes - Who she?
Another book, a novel, “May We Be Forgiven”, for which Homes won the Women’s Fiction Prize.
It’s good but not that good. Too many detours, red herrings, unnecessary paddings.
But worth reading anyway, at times moving and funny and an absolute action packed tour de force.

What are Chinese Lanterns?
There’s been a horrific industrial fire in a recycling warehouse; fire investigators blame a single Chinese lantern seen floating above stacks of packed recycling material on CCTV images. We only knew the horticultural variety of Chinese lanterns which look very pretty but have never been known to cause more than a rash.

Nouns Of Assembly
A breakfast ramble. We were arguing about collective nouns, in particular jackdaws and rooks.  We have hundreds of these noisy, greedy, gregarious birds, at this time of year they bring along their entire families; all my clapping, shouting and beating a pillow with a stick to mimic a shot doesn’t frighten them into leaving.
Jackdaws collectively are known as a train or a clattering, whereas rooks collectively are a building or parliament. I like the phrase  'a murder of crows’ , another member of the genus Corvus.

Etymology of ‘barbecue’
The reason for wanting to know this is easy, we’ve just been to one. There are lots of explanations but the most likely one is that the word originally came from the West Indian “barbacoa” which denotes slow-cooking meat over hot coals.


There you are, all of it totally innocuous and inoffensive, not a search term amongst them which would give a spook cause for a sharp intake of breath. And all thanks to Mr. Google. It would have taken me days to assemble and dig through book information on these subjects.

Now there’s a thought - would that have been more fun?