Stranger In A Very Strange Land

In his novel 'The Go-Between', J. P. Hartley begins by saying, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. I'd like to pretend that I'd read the book but the truth is I heard the quote while watching Doctor Who recently. Never the less, the truth of this statement continues to resonate with me. As I've gotten older I've become increasingly aware that the past changes from being the place where you live to another world with its own culture, fashions and mythology. 

This became clear to me several years ago when my daughter asked me 'What's Twisted Sister?' Answering her question I went to my vinyl collection and pulled out my copy of their LP 'Come Out and Play''. As I showed her the special pop-up cover featuring a snarling Dee Snyder leaping out of a man-hole, she suddenly exclaimed, 'What is that?' it was then that I became aware that she had no idea what a record was. 'It's like a big CD', I said. 'It’s what we used in the olden days before we had compact discs.

The older I get, the more I feel like a refugee from that foreign country. So many things I thought would always be with us, newspapers, landlines, cinema cartoons and telegrams, have all begun to disappear or have already gone. Just as scrolls once gave way to books, much of the things of my past will one day be obsolete, As I come to terms with the fact the adventures of Mandrake the Magician will never grace the pages of the Australian Women's Weekly ever again, I know I have two choices, to stay stuck in a disappearing past and go the way of dinos, dodos and Betamax, or to embrace the new treasures of the present and look to the future with optimism, believing that I have a place in that new country as I did in the old. This doesn't mean I can't bring the good things from the past with me into my new home, but it does mean that they need to find a place amongst the culture of the new. Where as I used to watch Tarzan on my VHS, I now watch it on DVD, or even my iPod. Instead of writing a letter on pen and paper, I know use email or messenger. I even read comics on the Internet. These things are just the tip of the iceberg of change, as I look forward to even greater achievements while taking up my citizen ship in the country of the future, This foreign land is a place where I hope they finally deliver on flying cars, hover boards and the mandatory silver jumpsuit, a silver suit for the golden years.

PS: I now listen to Twisted Sister on my iPod, bringing the world of yesterday into the world of tomorrow. Rock On!

Sigfried, Dragons and an Elven Princess

Earlier in the year I wrote about some of the fun I've been having investigating the dim dark roots of my family tree. The beauty of having some distant viking blood is that you can easily find yourself walking in the border lands between straight history and that forged in the Nordic/Germanic imagination of times gone by. What originally started as an attempt to impress my wife by arguing my descent from Ragnar Lothbrok,  of HBO's 'Vikings' fame, set me on a path of discovery that led me through the tangled threads of Wikipedea's web of knowledge. It was here that I came across the ancient stories of the Burgundian Kingdom, Atila the Hun, the stories of the Volsung family and other Germanic and Norse heroes of the dark ages.

When you have distant branches of the family laying claim to various historic and mythological notaries, you soon find yourself paddling in the same gene pool that Tolkien was hanging around when casting for his Middle Earth sagas. To cut a long story short, one of my great grandmothers was a Mcleod, a clan which some histories say were descended from the legendary viking invader, Ivar the Boneless. Once you hit pay dirt like this, you're  off and running because if there is one thing that the Vikings were good at, it was not letting reality get in the way of a good saga.

As I followed the various threads that the Internet offered, I came across familiar names like Gandalf and Frodo. I also learnt that I supposedly had elven blood flowing through my veins. It appears that one of my ancestors King Sigurd Hring, father of Ragnar, married one Alfhild, daughter of Gandalf, the King of Alfheim or Fairyland. Another ancestor, King Volsung of Hunaland, married Hijod, supposedly a giantess, who became the mother of Sigmund, and grandmother of the legendary Sigurd or Sigfried the dragon slayer. I suspect that at times when the mother of a child was unknown, either forgotten or coming from the wrong side of the sheets, it became a good opportunity to add a little magic into the family line. Regardless of the doubtfulnes of such supernatural forbeares, my children have begun to defer to this ancestory in order to explain the wide range of heights with in our family.

Something that caught my attention when playing around with these mythic legends/ sober family history, was the story of the dragon slayers that appeared in my research. Ragnar Lothbrok, Sigmund and most famously, Sigfried, all took on dragons in combat and won, claiming the great horde of treasures that the wyrms jealously guarded. From the (boring) perspective of sober historian, I always wondered how dragons had crept their way into the stories of the ancient heroes and questioned whether there was a greater meaning than just adding narrative colour to ancient biographies. The answer I wanted was discovered in the story of the dragon Fafnir.

Fafnir, also known as Frænir, was the foster uncle of Sigfried and began life as a dwarf, or giant according to Wagner. After killing his father to steal his treasure, he acquired a magical ring called Andvaranaut, forged by the sorcerer dwarf Andvari, also known as Albrecht, or Oberon, Shakespeare's king of the fairies. The magic ring, besides generating wealth and treasure, also carried a curse that bought tragedy with it. Fafnir became increasingly obsessed by the treasure he had acquired and over time was consumed by greed, transforming him into a dragon through the influence of the ring. Some versions of the story also include a magic helmet, the Tarnhelm, that aided in the reptillian tranformation. By the time the confrontation with his foster nephew took place, Fafnir was a greedy wyrm. zealously guarding his treasure horde, the ancient prototype to Tolkien's Smaug. 

To the people who told and retold the history of the ancient Burgundians, recasting it into heroic tales of gods and monsters, the dragon was the symbol of greed. A man may become a dragon if he is overwhelmed by the endless desire  to acquire more. Such greed is no respecter of family tie or friendship. It seeks to put the lust for wealth before the welfare of self and others, creating a monster that is all too recognisable, even in this modern age that has seen the rise of corporate power that rivals that of governments. I can;t help but wonder what elements of our culture will be recast as dragons when it comes time for our days to be retold as myth and legend, I can only hope that I will be associated with the hero's and not the monsters of our times.