Palestinians talk about "al-Naksa", the "Setback" or "Catastrophe" of 1967, and the "Disaster" of 1947, as the seminal moments that led to the Palestinian Diaspora, but the truth is that the real catastrophe happened much earlier, when the Great Arab Revolt began, today in 1916. What they lost then, and will never recover, was fully 60% of traditional Falastina - the land that is now misnomered as the Hashemite Republic of Jordan (click here for the full details)
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Wagner’s
opera "Tristan und Isolde" premiered in Munich, today in 1865...
but also an opportunity to ask a hugely important question about the way we record history: is it history, or is it actually fiction? Or maybe the midway point between those two: pseudo-history. This is how Dahut tells the tale of Tristan and Isolde to Mark Gradlon in my novel “The Land
Beside The Sea":
“Uncle Mark, of course, was a very different
King of Cornwall, several centuries after Gradlon-Meur. It was he who was
betrothed to the beautiful Irish princess Isolde, and sent his nephew, Tristan,
Prince de Lyonesse, by ship to Ireland to bring her back for him. He also gave
Tristan a phial containing a love philtre; Tristan was to give it to Isolde to
drink at the very moment she set eyes on Mark, because the magic of the philtre
lay in making its drinker fall in love with the very next man she met. But on
board ship, by simple accident, the two partook together of the potion, and
passed the remainder of the journey consummating what had become a tireless
passion. Returned to Cornouaille - well, it depends which version of the legend
you prefer. In one, Mark takes out his sword on realising what has happened,
and strikes Tristan dead; in the other, moved by the power of love, Mark spares
Tristan, provides for him a different but almost equally lovely wife, and
endows him with a château and land in Brittany. But for Isolde both versions
are identical: a loveless marriage with Mark forced upon her before she had set
both feet firmly on the soil of Cornwall; and as soon afterwards as she could
find the opportunity, departure on the voyage to the Underworld to join her
beloved in the arms of Death. And for King Mark, the loss of everything he
loved, before he had even been given the chance to start to love it.”
Presented as mediaeval history, a true story; but actually pseudo-history, like all the courtly romances of the time: ancient
mythological tales of the Celtic people, no longer acceptabler to Christianity, but so deeply embedded in the culture that removal is impossible: reduce the gods to humans then, and make them loveable, so the common folk will have no cause to coomplain. On this occasion a tale of the King of the Underworld, in which phases of
the moon get intertwined with cycles of the sun, the means the ancients used to explain the workings of the cosmos before the langiage of science had been invented. All the Arthurian legends belong under the same heading, as does the involvement of Guy Faux in the Gunpowder Plot (see Nov 5). The Jewish equivalent is
the tale of Saul, David and Michal, for which click here).
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