Christmas 2010

For those of you unlucky enough to miss our Christmas Dinner, here it is again....

What's in a name....

...well! Quite a lot actually. I was struggling to find some names in Old English and decided to turn to the Old English Facebook page, and got a little help with one: Jerusalem.

Rebecca Katya Danicic wrote "hello! I just joined this group, so this comment's probably too late. However, i've just been translating 'The Wanderer' and came across the compound 'eardgeard'. The noun might mean 'city' and literally translates as 'homeland-dwelling', but it is used of Jerusalem in the triad of poems called 'Christ'."

I'm guessing this is a literary word, because Dr Stuart Lee, of Oxford University helped out here and let me know that Jerusalem was Ierusalem. How easy was that!
Normandy was Normandig, which when you know 'g' was pronounced 'y' makes sense.

The others, and a few extras I came across:

Strathclyde comes from the Celtic, Srath Chluaidh. But I found an Anglo Saxon Chronicle ref, involving beating up the men of Cumbra land

Flanders: comes from Dutch, I think,and I couldn't find a better word so I used Bruges, which was Bricge

Norway was Northweg, which means the North Way. I guess there must be a South Way somewhere....

I wanted the book to start in Viking Dublin, for a number of reasons, and finding old english names for Ulster, Connaught and Munster were quite difficult. I found a Norse name for Ulster, Ulfastir. Munster didn't really have an equivalent, but the roughly similar kingdom (which gives its name to the Meath of West Meath etc) was Mide.

Saxony: I thought would be tough, but the Old English had a fond feeling for the Saxons they left behind and (from Bede) is the name Eadlseaxum: the Old Saxons.

I really enjoyed the search, and during it I realised I've at last reached the stage of knowing enough old english to work these out, which also felt great.

All Quiet

It's very strange around here. For the first time in five years I've no book on the go. It's still with the copy editors, and the longer the process drags on, the more distant the book feels.

It's starting it's own life - out there - meeting the audience.

But I did get the cover through last week. Top blurb is a bit of filler for the moment, but you get the idea.




I love it. Feel like I've finally broken through from having pretty Chinese women on the cover of my books. Not that I have anything against pretty chinese women, and they do honour to my feminine side. But it's good to remember the masculine side as well.

The Eve of Hastings

Of course you knew, dear reader, that 13th October is the night before Hastings.

Babies Leaving Home

you know,. it's so long since I last gave a book to publication, (six years!) I feel something of a newb, and keep having to ask my editor: so, what happens next?

Shield Wall went to be copy edited yesterday, and it's scheduled to return n the beginning of November. It's a slightly odd feeling, like fighting a battle, where the enemy come back at you again and again and again, and then suddenly you look up and the enemy have disappeared, and you realise - almost after the event, that you've won.

It's kind of like this. I waited for my editor to come back with comments, and instead he told me the book had gone to the copy editor. It's like a child leaving home. My baby has been sent off, and for the author, this is the moment that your baby leaves home and goes off to have it's own life. And you aer left behind with the memories of the first day your baby opened thier eyes, or walked, or said Dada!

Had another bolly of course, but this is a more bittersweet moment. It's my baby, going out into the world.

But heh, it's a great book! I'm sure it'll have a long and happy life.

Light the candle, infuse the tea, put the bolly on ice

If you've followed this blog at all, you'll know what a dragged out process finishing a book is. The mss ping pongs back through various stages of editing, which ranges from story, to chapter, to paragraph, to sentence, to word and then grammar. And everything in between.

But I think Shield wall is about at the end of this process. I had a few things my editor wanted me to look at, and then I had things I wanted to look at, and I procrastinated until today, because I wanted to have a day with nothing else to do but lock myself into a room with the world and the characters, and just hang out with them, in a literary kind of way.

It went well. I was spell-checking by 3pm, and had a chance to take a long walk and see if anything else came to me.

There's a niggling reluctance now, to send it in. But it's time really, and so here goes.

Somewhere, almost out of hearing, a long slow drum roll begins.....

Larboard and Curry

Working through the last notes, I came upon a couple of interesting etymological conundrums.

The first is the word 'curry' which I have used to describe richly spiced stews. I used this word because the earliest English cook book is named 'A Form of Cury' ( written by the cook of Henry II, in AD.1390 and includes hares in talbotes and capons in coney) which delighted me, because it seemed that 'curry' had a history and etymology long before our contact with India and tumeric and vindaloo. It also seemed to reinforce the idea that medieval English cookery was much closer to the spiced food of the middle east, than our more modern cuisine.

But strangely enough, a check with the Anglo-Indian Dictionary named Hobson-Jobson, curry does indeed come from a Tami word,
kari, which meant sauce. And a check with the Oxford English Dictionary, shows that 'Cury', from a 'Forme of Cury', comes from a middle french word, the predecessor of the word cuisine. Ah well!

Another interesting one was the word 'port' for the left side of a boat, which dates from only 1855, when it was officially adopted by the British Navy. The previous word was the middle english, 'larboard' - which was the 'ladde board'. Ie the side where the gangplank went, with ladde related to the verb laden, 'to load'.

The Old English was bæcboard. Though why the backboard, as opposed to 'steorboard/starboard' I'm not sure.