The selkie who dareth not speak

I was musing about the Selkie topos; that it might be a memory of the hunter-gatherers gone fishin'. The most-famed North Sea were-creature legend, from the Danes to us, is Hans Christian Andersen's Den lille havfrue. For Andersen, when the maiden mermaid joins normative (farming) man, it turns out she cannot speak.

I had been assuming that Andersen was pulling from Old Norse legend. On that basis I further interpreted the havfrue's muteness as that she didn't speak the farmers' language.

But... Andersen doesn't say that the havfrue couldn't speak the local language. He says she couldn't speak AT ALL.

As Andersen constructed the story, the havfrue had sacrificed her voice for the ability to interact with normies. There's talk on the internet that Andersen meant this as an analogy of Teh Closet. The havfrue can love... so long as "she", the one who pines to be the other, doesn't speak of it. And I admit: the element of sacrifice points that way.

However I persist that the background elements in the tale share much in common with the selkie motifs, rife through the North Sea. Amphibious para-humans (shamans?) live at sea, adjacent to a land village; and by nature, the twain shall not mix.

So let's consider Andersen's chosen barrier: mermens' inability to speak on land. Might he have got this too from his sources?

The Neanders even before the Western Hunter Gatherers were fishers. More likely they gathered molluscs, from off the Atlantic coast; the Pauper's Protein as Londoners used to call it. We know that because the Neanders got Swimmer's Ear. (UPDATE 3/31: mussels confirmed.) It's cold on the Atlantic fringe. Andersen himself must have met many deaf swimmers on the Danish coast.

I've since noted that in the aftermath of the 6200 BC famine, hunter-gatherers on rivers moved to a fish diet around the world. (Aquaculture, in proto-China.) Gatherers on the Atlantic would have spent more time in a colder Atlantic, by necessity.

If Andersen was working from an old South Scandinavian template, he's heard a story - ultimately - about a maiden brought up by deaf-mutes. I don't know if she is deaf yet herself (the legend doesn't require it) but her genetics, perhaps, had drifted away from hearing and maybe even more so from speaking. Why speak (beyond a loud wail) if none can hear (excepting maybe her mother, back when SHE was young)?

Oh, and some gratuitous genomic nerdery - The main genetic deafener of Eurasians is mutation at connexin 26. Among Europeans the gene (not) there is 35delG. Over the previous decade (2001-2011) ancestral 35delG was pinpointed to the eastern Mediterranean, 12k-8k BC; it then traveled through Europe. That much must have come with the Farmers. But 35delG is just one SNP. Ashkenazim get that too, and 167delT. Chinese get instead 235delC. Who knows what else was rotten in Stone Age Denmark.

None of this means to besmirch Andersen's creativity. That his selkie, the havfrue, sacrificed her voice is a powerful tweak to his sources. It made of an already tragic star-crossed story, a heartbreak for all the ages. The modern marriage-equality movement can (and does) point to this story as a founding text, perhaps on par with Uncle Tom's Cabin.

BACKDATING 11/8

That aurora again

I found that Chapman in 2015 had done my work for me on the 776 pseudocomet, so that whole section is out. Further, since Arabic typesetting is hard, and since I ain't got O. 9449 at hand around here, I've put screencaps of the Zakkar edition of Nuaym's text.

Again: I am not finished. Left to do: convert the references into some standard, whatever that standard might be; delete the end acknowledgement of that astronomer's aid, since I'm going to offer him co-writing credit; continue digesting the feedback he's offered thus far; and await whatever Dr David Cook (and others) might tell me.

I've posted the PDF in its current state so that Dr Cook, and anyone else looking in on this effort, have a more-professional document to look at.

Lactase

Lactase is the enzyme which breaks down lactose. That's a special kind of sugar, in milk, which mammals (ideally) should grow out of drinking. Failure to do that - lactase persistence - results in Kate Upton obsessives and nobody wants those around.

Over the Neolithic, men who'd already learnt to domesticate dogs and, maybe, rabbits learnt to domesticate the big dumb mammals, starting I think with sheep. It occurred to some of these men to milk the beasts. That allowed a sort of interim-weaning for human infants and, further, led to lactose-light cheeses and several other dairy products. The one exception, in adults, was milk itself - but who needed that anyway, in an age before Louis Pasteur.

David Reich is here to constrain lactase persistence. Milk-guzzling did not come with the Neolithic farmers and herders. It came with the Bronze Age - with western Europeans, like the Sabines.

Why they chose to keep drinking milk as adults, I know not - but I'll take a guess at it. It is often the case that a sugary liquid crop is fermented for drink, before it is consumed "raw". Milk, in a pre-Pasteur age, historically was fermented as kumiss. Indo-European gatherers were famed connoisseurs of mead honey-wine; berry boozes are all over the Balkans to this day. A pastoral society, with direct descent from gatherers, would experiment with milk.

AIDS resistance in the Chalcolithic steppe

David Reich has a summary of his lab's work up to October. Most of it is familiar; and you'll have to sit through his nice-Jewish-boy voice and mannerisms to get there (Heeb-to-Heeb, the man needs a voice-coach). For those who've read Reich, the new stuff picks up around 25 minutes or so.

One such: an HIV resistance gene. I recall mention of this gene in 2001. The gene was associated with survivors of the 14th-century AD Yersinia pestilence. Now, Reich's lab has tracked it to 5000 BC, north of the Caspian and traveling both sides of the Urals. This route became, later, the main byway of the historic Plague.

This region as of 5000 BC is Yamnaya Ground Zero. Given the cluster in the British Isles 1000 BC, I strongly suspect the gene was bourne by the Bell Beaker invaders in between.

I don't dismiss an HIVlike out of Africa before our nineteenth century. Also, genetic drift was a definite Thing in the sparsely-peopled early steppe. I do, however, wonder how this gene got selected for. One problem of course is that nobody's found HIV anywhere in Eurasia at this time. Although we may not have been looking yet.

It might also be that plague and HIV behave similarly. Plague kills when it sneaks past the immune system. HIV kills when it takes over the immune system. I'm so Generation X, I remember when they were still calling the latter a strain of the T-Cell Leukaemia.

Is this gene a hyperallergic reaction? A generally "hypochondriac" immune-system might identify both the bacterium and the virus, where a normal system might not.

Salfuyche's bridgework

Simon Whitechapel's "Symposium of the Gargoyle" starts with an assumption of a bridge between Vyônes and Ximes, for trade. I've investigated this through Clark Ashton Smith canon. I submit an indictment against Salfuyche for sabotage.

The Nuaym bin Hammad aurora, revisited

I've been consulting with an astrophysicist on that aurora. I have made some important digressions as a result (here).

First, I now think the comet which Kronk 1999 notes for 776 must be the same phenomenon as the "vapor" noted elsewhere. That vapor is currently agreed auroral. That would render Kronk's 776 a pseudocomet.

Second, it was brought to my attention that I'd confused the issue when I brought Nu'aym #596 to the table. So I am hereby kicking it off the table. I looked up the poltroon who transmitted the hadith to Nu'aym, one 'Abd Allah bin Marwan, and found his accounts... consistent. Consistent with a 200/815ish forger. We don't need him for the 770s.

I am still not nearly done with the project but I wanted to put up a placeholder.

Why Sadoqua didn't make the cut

If you're reading The Averoigne Legacy, which you should (preview available Google; may be purchased here), you may have noted Hilger's collaboration.

The "Oracle of Sadoqua" derives from the Black Book. It involves a man seeking out the mystery of Sadoqua and being consumed by it. It is similar in structure to "Satampra Zeiros" from the Hyperborean cycle.

To be brutally honest, I think it is "Satampra Zeiros". It may be a halfbaked crossover. Alternately it is an earlier version, first cut for Averoigne with Hyperborean callbacks, and finally brought to its correct state as fully Hyperborean. Either way, its redundant nature explains why Smith never expanded on the tale himself.

By contrast "The Doom of Azédarac", also a Black Book unfinished-tale, seems more original. Its expansion is well worth the read.

BACKDATING 11/2 2:55 PM MST

CONSIDER 12/6 Ulua and Istarelle.