If you don’t read Spanish (there isn’t anything else like this in English), you might like looking at the first chapters of Cuba And Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. They deal with early Iberia — well, Africa and the Phoenicians, as well as the Islamic era. It takes a while before we go to Cuba. Music is the forensics for so much history.

Love, C.

Weirdly, last week I finally read the first Lymond volume, Game of Kings from beginning to end — I have never been able to get through it before, ever, no matter how often I tried because of She Who I Should Not Name, and the terrible, and yes, I will now proclaim it, pernicious influence on her work of Lymond — and I still hate him.

Except I am impressed by the descriptive power of the places in which the characters make passage in the course of the narrative.

Love, C.

And, of course, how early slaves were imported from Africa to the Iberian Peninsula (there were already sugar plantations worked with African slaves in Portugal and Spain by the time Columbus sailed on his first western voyage). Slavery of every kind persisted all around the Mediterranean rim, for that matter, long after the rest of Europe gave up the condition — until the African Atlantic trade began again to bring labor to the New World.

As for Scott’s attitude though, about slavery as it existed in the New World — he was against it. He was active in groups that agitated for the end of Britain’s slave trade and that of the U.S. as well, as can bee seen, for instance in Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756-1838, published by the Univ. Edinburgh Press.

If you don’t have access to JSTOR etc., you can see some of this work here.

An interesting aside regarding Scott and slavery in the U.S.: Frederick Douglas — who also had a fair amount of influence on President Lincoln — escaped from slavery in 1838 and took the last name of Douglass from Sir Walter Scott’s hero in “The Lady of the Lake”. See here.

Love, C.

You’re right that he treats Wamba–who is certainly a slave–with respect, and allows him to argue against slavery and ultimately escape it–but there are also two _black_ slaves in Ivanhoe who don’t come off that well.

You may not remember them, because they don’t have any lines (except, I think, for threatening grunts in Arabic). They’re the slaves the main villain, the Knight Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert, brought back from the Crusades. And they’re part of his general I’m-wearing-a-black-hat-boo-for-me paraphenalia.

There’s a strong sense that BG has been “corrupted” by his contact with “Eastern” culture–including, hilariously enough, the dark tan he’s gotten in the Middle East. (Cue music for scary brown people!) You could certainly argue that being a slave-owner is part of that, as it fits into the Orientalist idea of the Islamic world being more hierarchical & unjust, etc.

But there’s no sense that Scott recognizes the slaves’ humanity. They loom menacingly and threaten Isaac with torture and generally take a page from the anti-black racism playbook of the 19th century–the “savage” without the “noble” bit. It’s very much in line with Islamophobic ideas current at the time (and, sadly, now). BG is a complicated and ambiguous and maybe even redeemed villain, but his henchmen don’t get to be.

Scott was roundly criticized for including black characters at all, which his contemporaries thought was an anachronism (admittedly one of many). I’m not so sure about that (Old Irish wouldn’t have a word for sub-Saharan Africans if there hadn’t been a need for it, and we now know a lot more about Africans in Iberia and Sicily, and the trans-Mediterranean slave trade, which started early).

But I’m also not sure that Scott would have made the connection between Anglo-Saxon slavery and slavery in the Southern US. He might have–but his racism might also have gotten in the way.

I think about the way Scott treats Isaac. There’s no doubt that the novel condemns the vicious anti-Semitism of many of its characters, but the portrait of Isaac also reinforces anti-Jewish stereotypes (as money-grubbing, cowardly, etc.).

So I’m less sanguine about how Scott would have responded to his Confederate fans. I think, like many things in the novel, it’s ambiguous–which is a shame, as I enjoy the novel a great deal while also being disturbed by it. There’s probably a lot still to say, however, about how Confederate readers misread the book.

Scott was as privileged as anyone could be in his society who wasn’t an aristocrat, and who didn’t have a paralyzed leg from a childhood illness (early polio?) and who may have died except his family had the resources of family, economics and all the rest to keep him alive, educated and all the rest during those childhood days — as well as those days providing the writer the materials out of which he was inspired to write his novels.

Still, in his novels, he tried to show the value of reconciliation and letting go of the past. He didn’t seem to value slavery — as again, going by what the slave characters in his novels say.

With all the class and so on issues with Scott, it’s still hard to believe he would have enjoyed being glorified by the Confederacy slave owners.

Love, C.

It doesn’t have the racial connotations, but you’re right, it does smack of cultural appropriation. That is, it comes from this overwhelming tendency of white Americans to believe that we (using we to refer to myself as part of said group) have no culture, and exoticize the hell out of everything different because it’s so interesting and meaningful, unlike our banal everyday. And with the Celtic nations it’s prevalent because OMG OUR PEOPLEZ CAME FROM THAR AND WERE OPPRESSED and they’re white people and speak English along with $other-language and are therefore safe.

Add to this the fact that everybody, and that doesn’t just include Americans, has a tendency to visualize and write other cultures in terms of stereotypes, and you have a big fat mess. I subscribed to it; I won’t run from admitting that, or from admitting I still have a lot to work through. Living in Scotland helped, actually, and I think a lot of people could benefit from some time in a foreign country.

I agree with your rec of Halting State–I really enjoyed it and found it refreshing. I just could very well never read another pseudo-Celtic fantasy society again.

Dorothy Dunnett’s research is all but impeccable (I do pec’ a bit at Lymond being able to swim the Nor’ Loch in the 15th century: I think he would only be able to squelch it…): it’s not her fault I totally hate Lymond so much.