naturalplastic wrote:
If you're going launch into this kind of prose- poem you should be aware of a certain historic precedent for puning on the words "angle" and "angel" ( or atleast a precedent according to legend).
Fourteen hundred years ago Pope Gregory I. was strolling through Rome and happened upon a slave market. He asked about the origin of a group of boys being offered for sale, and was told that they were "Angles" from the fairaway island of Britain.
He was an incurable punster, and he was struck by the boys' fair coloration. So the legend goes that he quipped "it is fitting that a people so angelic looking should be called 'Angles'".
The encounter supposidly inspired the Pope to start sending missions to Christianize Britain.
This use of the word "Angle" ( as in Anglo-Saxon) you may protest is not the same word "angle" thats used in Geometry class.
But the two words may be related.
Before the Angles and Saxons overran Britain when Roman rule collapsed there- the Angle tribe lived on a tiny patch of land on the German coast- where the shore bends to accomidate Denmark jutting out of Germany.
The old Germanic word for 'hook', or "bend" is "Angle"(as in 'angling' for fish). So it possible that the Angles were named after the 'hook' where they originally lived.
Thanks for that. I found two interesting synchronicities after I wrote the thought.
I always look to Google to see if someone thought 'of it' before I did. Cool tool for that.
Regarding the interesting story about the pope, I'm not sure where my blonde hair came from as a child, that stayed that way into the end of high school. Both my mother and father were dark haired. I do look very much like my father, so no 'foul play' indicated. :)
My grandfather was a Catholic Priest from Ireland, but his father was from the Black Forest of Germany. That is likely where the blonde hair came from.
He was also a Priest at the Vatican, author, magazine editor, and later Protestant Ministry director. I still have a Bible heirloom Blessed by the Pope at that time, sitting on a Piano that I used to describe animals as having the same vital spirit connection as humans in a post called Garden of Band-Aid.
The other synchronicity is that Colin Meloy wrote a 'famous' song about 'Angles and Angels'. He has an autistic son. I have actually connected with him on a blog before, when he was talking about his son, who is Hyperlexic like I am.
Nothing I write about is fiction.
16 Jun 2013, 10:30 pm
