... overshadow Karl's fun attempt to beat some White Elephants out of hiding below. He and I (but especially he) can't be the only academics to hoard fascinating, useless, obscure facts. Can we?
Also, readers may be interested to know that Adam Roberts has responded to Eileen's comments on his Valve essay about Grendel's Glove.
3 comments:
This is the most amazing White Elephant. The Altes Schloss (Old Castle), in Meersburg, is the oldest inhabited castle in Germany (founded in 628 by Dagobert, the king of the Franks).
http://www.burg-meersburg.de/
The pictures here don’t do it full justice. Its unconserved and eccentric decrepitude is a dream for anybody interested in multiple temporalities. It’s the kind of place where fifteenth-century manuscripts are left lying unopened, unnoticed and uncatalogued on open book shelves, beneath fake heraldic devices painted sometime around 1900 on the ceilings and now in a greater state of decomposition than the ‘genuinely’ medieval artefacts beneath them. There are twelfth-century (allegedly!) tournament dummies hanging on the walls of the shop above plastic soldiers on the shelves. It seems as though every generation from the 8th century to the present has had a go at asserting the pure History of the place (usually while taking leisure from some kind of all-too-apparent thuggery), and without it ever having got into the hands of any kind of neat-minded bespectacled professional. Just wonderful (the ship to Constance – zooming about in the background – sums it all up really).
sv VS/N50
PS. ALL blogging is egocentric!!
Okay, JJC--I responded to Adam Roberts, only this time with more politesse and humility, and also posted over at The Valve. Thanks for drawing our attention to this!
Violet Saunders (the medievalist formerly known as N50): great story, a white elephant filled with white elephants.
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