Saturday Good Reads - March 9, 2024

For years, my wife and I have dutifully recycled. Our suburb has had an active recycling program for a long time. At one time, you brought your materials to the center. Now, it’s curbside pickup. Some months back, we read that nearly 90 percent of all plastics that are theoretically recycled actually aren’t, simply because there’s no competitive market. And most of those recycled plastic bottles, detergent jugs, and other #1, #2, and #5 materials end up being shipped to places like Nigeria, where they are promptly dumped into rivers flowing to the ocean. The Center for Climate Integrity recently published a report, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling.” 

I’ve been thinking about producing a new bingo card, with a space for every time this year I hear “threat to democracy,” “end of democracy,” and similar sentiments. These sentiments are usually expressed by people willing to do anything to discredit a certain political candidate. And if it means destroying democracy in the process, so be it, reminding me of that army major in Vietnam who said, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Mark Tapscott at The Epoch Times describes a different direction for the threat to democracy, describing how the government used “Track F” to fund censorship tools. Matt Taibbi at Racket News describes an award he’s getting, and why it’s so worrisome as America enters the “Samizdat Era.”

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

Campus confidential: Inside the secret Cambridge societies hiding their unfashionable views – Charlie Bentley-Astor at The Critic Magazine.

 

Liberals and the Libel of “Christian Nationalism” – John Horvat at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Writing and Literature

 

Ten Years without Gabriel Garcia Marquez: An Oral History – Silvana Paternostro at The Paris Review.

 

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Guide to a Christian Classic – Austin Freeman at Desiring God.

 

American Stuff

 

The Soldier by the Road – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Nathan Bedford Forrest Redeemed? Part 1 and Part 2 – Evan Portman at Emerging Civil War.

 

The Women Codebreakers Who Uncovered Some of the Cold War’s Most Notorious Spies – Katherine Reay at CrimeReads. 

 

Faith

 

Holly Ordway on Tolkien’s Faith – Alan Cornett at Front Porch Republic.

 

Decisive Moments: The Fall of Jerusalem – Wes Bredenhof.

 

Ukraine

 

The epic battle that saved Kyiv from Russian occupation – Tim Mak at The Counteroffensive.

 

Art

 

New dawn: The birth of Impressionism revisited 150 years later in Paris exhibition – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper. See exhibition page at Musee d’Orsay.

 

Place – Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

 

Poetry

 

To Catch the Wind – Lucia Haase at Society of Classical Poets. 

 

The Seafarer: Man’s Despairing Mind, Wyrd Waters, & Gold in Death – Cody Ilardo at Power & Glory. 

 

Tea Cakes with Jesus – Kate Gaton at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Archaeology

 

An Astounding Excavation Uncovered a Medieval Village Under an Ancient Abbey – Darren Orf at Popular Mechanics.

 

News Media

 

“The Silly Furor Over “Allegedly” – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

LinkedIn doubles down on news as social rivals retreat – Sara Fischer at Axios.

 

Lexington – Casey McPherson of Alpha Rev

 Painting: St. Luke, oil on canvas (1625) by Frans Hals (ca. 1582-1666); Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art.

"The Sutton Hoo Story" by Martin Carver

I’d see an earlier exhibit of the artifacts of Sutton Hoo some years ago. But it was the 2021 film The Dig that really peaked my interest.  

The Sutton Hoo archaeological site is in Suffolk in southeastern England, northeast from London, due east of Cambridge, and not far from the city of Ipswich. It is a site containing a number of burial mounds, with some more prominent than the others (18 or 19 in all). In 1939, the landowner of the site, a widow named Edith Pretty, invited n amateur archaeological named Basil Brown to explore and excavate it. What Brown discovered was one of the most spectacular archaeological finds in Great Britain – a burial place for an Anglo-Saxon of high rank, with almost all of the items buried with him intact. The ship that had been part of the burial had long since disintegrated, but its outline was clearly visible.

 

The most probable date for the burial is between 600 and 650 A.D.

 

The British Museum came to visit, and Brown would find himself acknowledged but somewhat sidelined. The World War II began, and all archaeological work stopped. Sutton Hoo was in a particularly vulnerable area, close to the coast, in the event of a German invasion. 

 

In the movie, Carey Mulligan plays Edith Pretty, Ralph Fiennes is Basil Brown, and Lily James plays a member of the dig team. I enjoyed the movie so much that I vowed to make a special effort to see the exhibition at the British Museum if I ever returned to London. Return I did, and the top photograph here was taken by yours truly. I also found a book in the museum’s book shop.

 

The Sutton Hoo Story: Encounters with Early England by Martin Carver tells the story of this extraordinary discovery. It explains how Mrs. Pretty came to own the land and make her offer to Brown; what happened (or didn’t) during the war years, how work resumed after the war, and some of the remarkable discoveries that were made there.

 

But Carver does more than tell the Sutton Hoo story. He puts it in its historical and archaeological contexts, explaining how it was like and unlike other sites in Britain and Sweden. He recounts the long history of the excavations and study, and how the official records were developed and maintained. And he notes the “politics” of the site because politics, too, played a role. 

 

Martin Carver

It's a scholarly book, but one that is accessible to general readers. It’s a real treat if you’re interested in Anglo-Saxon history, post-Roman Britain, and archaeology generally. And it’s profusely illustrated with maps, schematics, and photographs, sufficient to satisfy the amateur archaeologist in all of us. 

 

A career Army officer, Carver because one of Britain’s first commercial archaeologists. He was a professor of Archaeology at the University of York for 22 years and editor of Antiquity for 10 years. He is now a full-time professional researcher, writer, public speaker, and broadcaster, and his research includes the Sutton Hoo site as well as other excavations in Britain Scotland, France, Italy, and Algeria. A project he’s involved in is a fundraising effort to rebuild the Sutton Hoo ship.

 

The Sutton Hoo Story is a delightful resource about a significant historical discovery. Mrs. Pretty would eventually donate the artifacts to the British Museum, and the site itself would become part of the National Trust, with its own visitors’ facility with guided tours, audio guides, a café and book shop. If you can’t make it to the site itself, the exhibition in the British Museum includes some of the most significant artifacts.

 

Related: 

 

Treasures from Sutton Hoo by Gareth Williams for the British Museum.

 

The Sutton Hoo Helmet by Sonja Marzinzik for the British Museum.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Waitress – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Welcome to the New Campus Normal: A Dispatch from Ohio State – Yeshua Tolle at Jewish Review of Books.

 

Christopher Wren, London Transport, and St. Mary Aldermanbury – A London Inheritance.

 

A liberal rabbi’s cry: ‘We’ve lost so damn much. Let us not lose our damn minds…” – Terry Mattingly at GetReligion. 

 

In Old Liverpool St Station – Spitalfields Life.

Every Day Poems: Community Centos + New Poetry Club Invitation -- Tweetspeak Poetry.

‘Digging for Richard III’ by Mike Pitts

I was in high school when I first read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, originally published in 1951. Tey’s detective, Inspector Alan Grant, is laid up in the hospital, and avoids boredom by reexamining what is likely the most serious charge ever laid against a British sovereign – the murder of the young princes in the Tower of London by Richard III, the last of the Plantagent kings. Tey’s mystery is fascinating and rather pointedly suggested that history could well be?

But then, what academic would take a mystery novel seriously?

Four years later, an American historian named Paul Murray Kendall did academically what Tey had done novelistically. He wrote a biography of Richard III that relied exclusively on contemporary sources instead of the later accounts like that of Sir Thomas More (Shakespeare used More’s account for the basis of his play Richard III.) What Kendall discovered was that there was a world of difference between what Richard’s contemporaries said and what later (and rather obviously biased Tudor) accounts said.

In 1998, film writer Philippa Langley stopped briefly at a Waterstone’s bookstore in Edinburgh, to find something to read while on holiday. She saw an old book, thought it looked interesting, and bought it. She later said she spent less than minute picking it out. The book was Kendall’s biography of Richard III.

Her selection changed history, figuratively and literally. After reading the book, she became convinced that Richard’s reputation has been deliberately blackened by writers seeking to flatter the Tudors, not to mention the Tudors themselves. Richard had been turned into a monster, while contemporaries had a very different perspective.

Portairt of Richard III ion the Nationakl Portrait Gallery, London

Langley would play a critical role over the next 14 years in what became one of the marvels of modern archaeology – the discovery of “Skeleton X’ during a dig in Leicester in central England, the skeleton confirmed as that of Richard III. In fact, she played a critical role in the questioning, badgering, motivating , fundraising and undertaking the dig at the site of Greyfriars Friary.

Or at least it was thought to be the site; no one was quite sure. The friary, which contained Richard’s tomb, had been destroyed during the dissolution of the abbeys, monasteries and convents by Henry VIII after the English Reformation (Henry was less interested in theology and church matters and more interested in the divorce the Pope wouldn’t grant and the wealth that the various Catholic institutions held in England). The story was that at the time of the friary’s destruction, an angry move had destroyed the tomb, exhumed Richard’s remains, and tossed them in the nearby Soar River.

Mike Pitts

The story of the discovery and confirmation of Richard III’s skeleton is wonderfully told in Digging for Richard III: the Search for the Lost King by Mike Pitts, first published in 2013 and updated and expanded earlier this year to cover the reburial earlier this year. Pitts was well-suited to write the story – he’s the editor of British Archaeology Magazine and the author of several archaeological works, including Hengeworld, the account of the discovery of a large prehistoric temple in Somerset.

Digging for Richard III is a full and fascinating account of how the king’s remains were discovered – the role of Philippa Langley, the assembling of the team at the University of Leicester, how Richard III societies around the world contributed to the funding of the project, and how the goals of the archaeological team often conflicted with those of Langley and her supporters. The team was trying to identify the site of the friary, with the finding of Richard III’s remains somewhere down the list of objectives. In fact, the archaeological team didn’t really think finding Richard’s remains was all that likely.

Facial reconstruction from the skeleton's skull by the University of Dundee

This was a project that did not go as archaeology projects usually go. As Pitts quotes the members, typically a team will find a few pottery shards “you can’t even sell on eBay.” In the case  of the dig at Leicester, what was labeled “Skeleton X” was found the very first day of the dig. But it was simply a skeleton, until a forensic specialist began to dig the skeleton out of the compacted dirt and discovered it had scoliosis, or a severe curvature of the spine. Just like the reports of Richard III. Four months later, DNA testing with descendants of the king confirmed it was indeed Richard III.

The findings sparked an international sensation, and, no surprise here, the inevitable lawsuits. All kinds of organizations and cities wanted Richard’s remains (think tourist dollars). There were online votes and lobbying, with Queen Elizabeth II giving a dignified nod to the cathedral at Leicester, a few short miles from where Richard was born and the nearby field where Richard died in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. This past spring, Richard was reburied in the cathedral.

Not all archaeological projects happen as thrillingly as this one, but Pitts tells a great story. It’s all about Richard III, yes, but it is also how forensic science, DNA testing, and good old intuition played critical roles in finding the body of a long-lost king.

At the reburial service, actor Benedict Cumberbatch read a poem written for the occasion by Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s Poet Laureate (you can watch the reading here). This is the poem:

Richard

My bones, scripted in light, upon cold soil,
a human braille. My skull, scarred by a crown,
emptied of history. Describe my soul
as incense, votive, vanishing; your own
the same. Grant me the carving of my name.

These relics, bless. Imagine you re-tie
a broken string and on it thread a cross,
the symbol severed from me when I died.
The end of time – an unknown, unfelt loss –
unless the Resurrection of the Dead …

or I once dreamed of this, your future breath
in prayer for me, lost long, forever found;
or sensed you from the backstage of my death,
as kings glimpse shadows on a battleground.

Related: Highlights of the reburial service earlier this year.

Archaeology

The excavation continues, this hill,

this lump of dirt and dust telling

a story. The workmen spaded

carefully; an unthinking jab

a potential act of destruction, as

they descended through years and

decades, centuries, millennia separated

by seconds on the clock, often. They

dug and shoveled, sifted and strained,

to reach the beginning, the first cause,

a mere sixty years before.

Photograph by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.