enevarim

If nothing else was going to get you out to vote, vote for her. If you were going to stay home because you didn't feel passionate, feel passionate for the justice who fought this long for equality, and fight.

That was a good king, in every sense of the old sense of it. She fucking rocked.

I am fucking crying over here, because you don't get to see heroes doing their work in public most of the time. But we got to see one. Now, I just. We have to fight.

You gave some latitude, Dave was thinking, to someone who’d sworn an oath like that, even if [her] style was more than occasionally jarring. You gave latitude because what [Maria] had done that evening was give voice, and not for the only time, to the mute rage in one’s own heart.

elisi

The Doctor’s refusal to destroy him and his new race is therefore justified. Because doing so would just keep the cycle going, keep the violence going. Gallifrey is never really gone for long, the Doctor already blew it up once. They are part of the cycle, always stepping in to stop the planet falling into its worst excesses, and always allowing it to be reset to a position where it can fester longer, and exercise its imperialism longer. The Doctor destroying Gallifrey means more angst, a planet turned martyr, us weeping for it, for the burning, long gone past of the show. But she doesn’t – a random character does it, an extra does it. The Doctor is free from Gallifrey

“So,” the Timewyrm whispered, “It comes to this, as it always had to. The Doctor and the Virus. Why didn’t you kill me, Time Lord?”

“Because my friend did me a great service.” The Doctor met the being’s gaze calmly. “She showed me that there was another option. If I destroyed you, you would only have returned in time. Like my guilt, my remorse, you’re part of a terrible cycle. I can’t take your life. I refuse to. But I can give you peace. Come with me, Ishtar. Let me help you.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“I asked the same question.” Ace stepped forward, a little surprised at her own confidence. “You trust him because you have to trust somebody. Okay, so he’s made a few mistakes, but he’s on the case now.” Ace paused, and looked the Doctor in the eye. “I trust you, Doctor.”

A strange look passed over the Doctor’s face and for a moment Ace thought that the Time Lord was going to cry.

Nothing has been more welcome to me, therefore, than the help and advice I received in the early stages of this work from a scholar-friend, the late Professor E. V. Gordon, whose supreme competence was equalled only by his generosity to fellow workers and his selfless devotion to learning. His untimely death put an end to a collaboration which I valued above all else and to which this edition owes more than words can acknowledge.

Several friends, including Sir Edmund Chambers, Professor M. K. Pope, and Professor T. B. W. Reid, were kind enough to read my Introduction in manuscript and give me the benefit of their advice on points of fact and interpretation.

As much of this work as belongs to me I dedicate to the memory of Joseph Bédier whose encouragement and example have been my lifelong inspiration. I wish for no higher reward than the knowledge that he would have recognized it as the work of a disciple.

The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things.

She developed an acute homesickness for Oxford and for the Study of Lefanu – a book which would never have any advertising value, but of which some scholar might some day moderately observe, ‘Miss Vane has handled her subject with insight and accuracy.’ She rang up the Bursar, discovered that she could be accommodated at Shrewsbury, and fled back to Academe.

Every time I hear someone complain that my book is unreadable because it has too much Spanish, I think two things:
1) At a guess, less than 1% of my novel is Spanish, and most of that is cussing. Por favor.
2) Ennyn Durin Aran Moria: pedo mellon a minno.

IDRIS: You're like a nine year old trying to rebuild a motorbike in his bedroom. And you never read the instructions.
ELEVENTY: I always read the instructions.
IDRIS: There's a sign on my front door. You have been walking past it for seven hundred years. What does it say?
ELEVENTY: That's not instructions.
IDRIS: There's an instruction at the bottom. What does it say?
ELEVENTY: Pull to open.
IDRIS: Yes. And what do you do?
ELEVENTY: I push.
IDRIS: Every single time. Seven hundred years. Police Box doors open out the way.

*udrós 'water' was a PIE adjective

this led to English 'otter', as well as the words for 'otter' in Sanskrit (udrá), Latin (lutra) and Slavic (e.g. Czech vydra)

but, in Greek, it became húdrā 'water snake', origin of the mythological Hydra

yes, 'Hydra' and 'otter' are cognates

https://twitter.com/MARIADAHVANA/status/1205702574625587200

In the Beowulf poem, though, there are moments when characters warn each other against becoming narcissistic leaders. These aren’t moments of major action. They’re the moments when old kings speak fears to young warriors, telling them “don’t let your story be that you were bad.”

Maybe, I say right now, having read this poem a hundred times, gnashing over why it’s still here, why it’s canon, why we care, this is the real story. That story is the only lasting weapon against evil. That story, good story, can flare across the night sky & change how it looks.

And so, as always, I’m thinking about which story is the light, whether designed or innate, lighthouse or dragonfire. I’m thinking about how to change all the stories to arrive at one that can keep going viably toward good in this century. What kind of heroes we need to create.

Large groups of heroes. Daily, prosaic heroes, story shaping shifters of civilization. The antidote to solo heroes in the Good King tradition. Those solo heroes, even in the Beowulf poem, written a thousand years and more ago, often get it wrong.

“Could you understand if I asked you not to fight tomorrow?”

“I should want to fight,” it said stoutly.

“Everybody wants to fight, Tom, but nobody knows why. Suppose I were to ask you not to fight, as a special favour to the King? Would you do that?”

“I should do what I was told.”

“Listen, then. Sit for a minute and I will tell you a story. I am a very old man, Tom, and you are young. When you are old, you will be able to tell what I have told tonight, and I want you to do that. Do you understand this want?”

“Yes, sir. I think so.”

“Put it like this. There was a king once, called King Arthur. That is me. When he came to the throne of England, he found that all the kings and barons were fighting against each other like madmen, and, as they could afford to fight in expensive suits of armour, there was practically nothing which could stop them from doing what they pleased. They did a lot of bad things, because they lived by force. Now this king had an idea, and the idea was that force ought to be used, if it were used at all, on behalf of justice, not on its own account. Follow this, young boy. He thought that if he could get his barons fighting for truth, and to help weak people, and to redress wrongs, then their fighting might not be such a bad thing as once it used to be. So he gathered together all the true and kindly people that he knew, and he dressed them in armour, and he made them knights, and taught them his idea, and set them down, at a Round Table. There were a hundred and fifty of them in the happy days, and King Arthur loved his Table with all his heart. He was prouder of it than he was of his own dear wife, and for many years his new knights went about killing ogres, and rescuing damsels and saving poor prisoners, and trying to set the world to rights. That was the King’s idea.”

“I think it was a good idea, my lord.”

“It was, and it was not. God knows.”

“What happened to the King in the end?” asked the child, when the story seemed to have dried up.

“For some reason, things went wrong. The Table split into factions, a bitter war began, and all were killed.”

The boy interrupted confidently. “No,” he said, “not all. The King won. We shall win.”

Arthur smiled vaguely and shook his head. He would have nothing but the truth. “Everybody was killed,” he repeated, “except a certain page. I know what I am talking about.”

“My lord?”

“This page was called young Tom of Newbold Revell near Warwick, and the old King sent him off before the battle, upon pain of dire disgrace. You see, the King wanted there to be somebody left, who would remember their famous idea. He wanted badly that Tom should go back to Newbold Revell, where he could grow into a man and live his life in Warwickshire peace – and he wanted him to tell everybody who would listen about this ancient idea, which both of them had once thought good. Do you think you could do that, Thomas, to please the King?”

The child said, with the pure eyes of absolute truth: “I would do anything for King Arthur.”

Well, you'll remember me a little. I'll be a story in your head. But that's okay. We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know. It was the best. The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away.

The foregoing … has been an exposition of the operation of Reason; but we must also furnish an account of what comes into existence through Necessity. For, in truth, the Cosmos in its origin was generated as a compound, from the combination of Necessity and Reason. And inasmuch as Reason was controlling Necessity by persuading her to conduct to the best end the most part of the things coming into existence, thus and thereby it came about, through Necessity yielding to intelligent persuasion, that this Universe of ours was being in this wise constructed at the beginning

DOCTOR: You didn't always take me where I wanted to go.
IDRIS: No, but I always took you where you needed to go.
DOCTOR: You did.