Mandelin
Published 2 Feb 2021Kalevala is the national epic of Finland. But if you have no time to read through all the 22,795 verses, but still want to learn more about this epic Finnish epic, this video contains most of the important things you need to know about.
April 29, 2022
Kalevala – The most epic national epic
April 25, 2022
Miscellaneous Myths: Pygmalion and Galatea
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Jul 2016Hey, any of you ever wanted a girlfriend? Statistically speaking, more than half of you just thought “yes”, and a non-trivial percentage probably even went so far as to think “HECK yes.” Well, this is the story of one brave pioneer who, rather than waiting for Miss Right to find him, decided to speed up the process by MAKING her! Don’t go getting any ideas, though — I’m afraid our boy didn’t quite think this through in advance.
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March 27, 2022
The zombie Russian empire under Tsar Vladimir I
In the most recent Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at the quasi-Imperial goals of Vladimir Putin:

Imperial Standard of the Emperor of Russia, used from 1858 to 1917.
Image by Trajan 117 via Wikimedia Commons.
“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” – Vladimir Sorokin, New York Review of Books, 2017.
The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of post-modern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.
Even when it’s based on bullshit. You’d be amazed how vacuous slogans about returning to a mythical past — “Make America Great Again!”, “Take Back Control!” — can move public opinion dramatically in even the most successful modern democracies. That’s one reason it’s self-defeating for liberals to press for maximal change in as many things as possible. National identity, fused often with ethnic heritage, has not disappeared in the human psyche — as so many hoped or predicted. It has been reborn in new and strange forms. Now is the time of monsters, so to speak. Best not to summon up too many.
This, it seems to me, is what many of us have missed about the newly visible monster of post-Communist Russia. It would be hard to conjure up a period of post-modern bewilderment more vividly than Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s. A vast empire collapsed overnight; an entire totalitarian system, long since discredited but still acting as some kind of social glue and cultural meaning, unraveled in chaos and confusion.
Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan.
But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim.
It came, like all reactionary movements, not from some continuous, existing tradition waiting to be tweaked or deepened, but from intellectuals, making shit up. They created a near-absurd mythology they rescued from the 19th and early 20th centuries — packed with pseudo-science and pseudo-history. Russia was not just a nation-state, they argued; it was a “civilization-state”, a whole way of being, straddling half the globe and wrapping countless other nations and cultures into Mother Russia’s spiritual bosom. Russians were genetically different — infused with what the reactionary theorist Lev Gumilev called “passionarity” — a kind of preternatural energy or will to power. They belonged to a new order — “Eurasia” — which would balance the Atlantic powers of the US and the UK, and help govern the rest of the world.
March 24, 2022
QotD: Tolkien’s wartime experiences and The Lord of the Rings
… there’s more to Tolkien than nostalgic medievalism. The Lord of the Rings is a war book, stamped with an experience of suffering that his modern-day critics can scarcely imagine. In his splendid book Tolkien and the Great War, John Garth opens with a rugby match between the Old Edwardians and the school’s first fifteen, played in December 1913. Tolkien captained the old boys’ team that day. Within five years, four of his teammates had been killed and four more badly wounded. The sense of loss haunted him for the rest of his life. “To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years,” he wrote in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. “By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”
Tolkien arrived on the Western Front in June 1916 as a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, and experienced the agony of the Somme at first hand. In just three and a half months, his battalion lost 600 men. Yet it was now, amid the horror of the trenches, that he began work on his great cycle of Middle-earth stories. As he later told his son Christopher, his first stories were written “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candlelight in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire”.
But he never saw his work as pure escapism. Quite the opposite. He had begun writing, he explained, “to express [my] feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalise it, and prevent it just festering”. More than ever, he believed that myth and fantasy offered the only salvation from the corruption of industrial society. And far from shaking his faith, the slaughter on the Somme only strengthened his belief that to make sense of this broken, bleeding world, he must look back to the great legends of the North.
Yet The Lord of the Rings is not just a war book. There’s yet another layer, because it’s also very clearly an anti-modern, anti-industrial book, shaped by Tolkien’s memories of Edwardian Birmingham, with its forges, factories and chimneys. As a disciple of the Victorian medievalists, he was always bound to loathe modern industry, since opposition to the machine age came as part of the package. But his antipathy to all things mechanical was all the more intense because he identified them — understandably enough — with killing.
And although Tolkien objected when reviewers drew parallels between the events of The Lord of the Rings and the course of the Second World War, he often did the same himself. Again and again he told his son Christopher that by embracing industrialised warfare, the Allies had chosen the path of evil. “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring,” he wrote in May 1944. “But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.” Even as the end of the war approached, Tolkien’s mood remained bleak. This, he wrote sadly, had been, “the first War of the Machines … leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines”.
“Trivial”, then? Clearly not. Tolkien was at once a war writer and an ecological writer; a product of High Victorianism and also a distant relative of the modernist writers who, like him, were trying to make sense of the shattered world of the Twenties and Thirties. But he wasn’t just a man of his time; he remains a guide for our own.
Dominic Sandbrook, “This is Tolkien’s world”, UnHerd, 2021-12-09.
March 19, 2022
History of Rome in 15 Buildings 01. The Hut of Romulus
toldinstone
Published 27 Sep 2018This first episode of my History of Rome in Fifteen Buildings discusses the origins of Rome in relation to the enigmatic and frequently-rebuilt structure known as the Hut of Romulus. Along the way, we’ll encounter a floating phallus, a remarkably accommodating she-wolf, and, of course, the homicidal demigod who founded the city of Rome.
If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my forthcoming book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
https://toldinstone.com/naked-statues…
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Thanks for watching!
March 14, 2022
Legends Summarized: Journey To The West (Part IX)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 26 Nov 2021Journey to the West Kai, episode 6: Two Weddings And An Asskicking
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February 14, 2022
QotD: Canadians and imaginary peacekeeping
… the word “peacekeeping” triggers a series of powerful memories and positive images in the Canadian mind: Lester Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize; a Canadian soldier in a blue helmet interposed between warring factions; the peacekeeping monument in Ottawa, and the widely believed mantra that, while Americans make war, we Canadians keep the peace.
Canadians are fixated on peacekeeping. We believe that Mike Pearson invented it, that Canadians are the best in the world at it, and that if we do peacekeeping, ideally for the United Nations, then we will not need large numbers of troops or much expensive equipment. The idea of peacekeeping as our métier has certainly shaped Canadian defence policy, and not for the better. The billions of dollars that Liberals and Conservatives have belatedly pledged to rebuild the Canadian Forces will take years to make a difference and to undo four decades of neglect …
J.L. Granatstein, “Wake up! This is our war, too”, Globe and Mail, 2006-02-28.
February 1, 2022
Ancient Nian Gao | Lunar New Year Cake
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 9 Feb 2021Help Support the Channel with Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tastinghistory
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Subtitles & Ketchup with Max host: Jose Mendoza
PHOTO CREDITS
Pig: By Made by Fanghong – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
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Nian gao 2: ProjectManhattan, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons
Chinese New Year Sticky Rice Cakes: ProjectManhattan, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons
Spring and Autumn Period Map: By Yug – Own work, *Background data: ETOPO1 + QGIS > then vectorized using Inkscape *Semantic data: some from Le Monde Chinois, Gernet, p58.or (en:) Gernet (1996) A History of Chinese Civilisation, Cambridge university press, p. 59, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
Statue of Wu Zixu: By Peter Potrowl – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
Bronze DIng: drs2biz, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons
Great Wall at Mutianyu: By J. Samuel Burner – https://www.flickr.com/photos/lobster…, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…MUSIC CREDITS
Music promoted by 1HMNC – No Copyright Music
PeriTune – Folk Chinese https://youtu.be/_FKFunLPksg Folk Chinese by PeriTune (https://soundcloud.com/sei_peridot) is licensed under a Creative Commons License.(CC BY 3.0)#tastinghistory #niangao #chinesenewyear #chinesefood
January 29, 2022
Miscellaneous Myths: King Midas
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Oct 2021Ahh, Midas. Shockingly one of the least Problematic ancient greek kings, and certainly one of the funniest to read about. Bizarrely good at surviving direct confrontations with temperamental gods!
PARTIAL TRACKLIST: Starfall, Flight of the Silverbird, Sky Becomes Water, Starfall
“Sneaky Snitch” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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January 1, 2022
A 4000 Year Old Recipe for the Babylonian New Year
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Dec 2020Help Support the Channel with Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tastinghistory
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Editor: WarwicSN – https://www.youtube.com/WarwicSN
Subtitles: Jose MendozaDISH NAME
ORIGINAL c.1740BC RECIPE (From The Yale Babylonian Tablets)
Tuh’u sirum saqum izzaz me tukan lipia tanaddi tusammat tabatum sikara susikillum egegerum kisibirrum smidu kamunum alutum tukammas-ma karsum hazannum teterri kisibirrum ina muhhi sipki tusappah suhutinnu kisibirrum isarutu tanaddi.Tuh’u. Lamb leg meat is used. Prepare water. Add fat. Sear. Add in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro, samidu, cumin, and beets. Put the ingredients in the cooking vessel and add crushed leek and garlic. Sprinkle the cooked mixture with coriander on top. Add suhutinnu and fresh cilantro.
MODERN RECIPE
INGREDIENTS
– 1lb (450g) Leg of Lamb Chopped into bite size pieces.
– 3-4 Tablespoon Oil or Rendered Fat
– 1 ½ teaspoons Salt
– 2 Cups (475ml) Water
– 12 oz (350ml) Beer – (A sour beer and German Weissbier are recommended, but any non-hoppy beer will suffice)
– 1 Large Onion Chopped
– 2 Cups Arugula Chopped
– 3/4 Cup Cilantro Chopped
– 2 Teaspoons Cumin Seeds crushed
– 2 Large Beets (approx. 4 cups) Chopped
– 1 Large Leek Minced
– 3 cloves Garlic,
– 1 Tablespoon Dry Coriander Seeds
– Additional Chopped Cilantro for garnish
– Samidu* (Something akin to 1 Persian Shallot)
– Suhutinnu* (Something akin to Egyptian Leek for garnish)
*These ingredients have no definite translation; the shallot and leek are the best guesses of scholars at Yale and Harvard Universities)METHOD
1. Add the oil/fat to a large pot and set over high heat. Sear the lamb for several minutes in the oil until lightly browned.
2. Add the onions and let cook for 5 minutes, then add the beets and let cook for 5 minutes. Then add the salt, beer, arugula, cilantro, samidu (shallot) and cumin and bring to a boil. Mash the garlic into a paste and mix with the leek, then add to the pot.
3. Lower heat to medium and let simmer for approximately 1 hour, or until the beets and meat are cooked to your liking.
4. Once cooked, dish it into a bowl and sprinkle with coriander seeds. Garnish with fresh cilantro and suhutinnu (leek)PHOTO CREDITS
Crocus: By Safa.daneshvar – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, http://bit.ly/3hfNN7F
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December 18, 2021
History Summarized: Minoan Greece
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Dec 2021The classical Greeks weren’t the first kids on the Aegean block. Long before Athens’ golden age, before Homer, and even before the Trojan War, there was a civilization on the island of Krete. The land of King Minos was home to beautiful palaces, a fascinatingly-complex economy, and something approximating Bull-Cthulu. It’s a fun time, let’s jump in.
SOURCES & Further Reading: The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline for National Geographic, The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton, Lectures from The Great Courses Plus — “Being Minoan and Mycenaean” from The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World by Robert Garland, and “Minoan Crete” & “Schliemann & Mycenae” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney. And I have a university degree in Classical Studies.
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December 14, 2021
Minoan Civilization
Thersites the Historian
Published 25 Jan 2018In this video, I look at the Bronze Age civilization on Crete known as the Minoans.
September 13, 2021
Early Rome, Part IV: Plutarch’s Life of Numa Pompilius
Thersites the Historian
Published 5 Sep 2021In this video, we look at how the philosopher Plutarch dealt with early Rome when he covered the life and times of Numa Pompilius, the most significant of Rome’s cultural heroes.
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September 12, 2021
Early Rome, Part III: Livy and the Roman Tradition of Early Rome
Thersites the Historian
Published 5 Sep 2021Here, I examine Livy’s Book I with an emphasis on the tradition that he worked in and his agenda for undertaking such a massive and ambitious project.
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September 7, 2021
Early Rome, Part II: Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the Greek Tradition of Early Rome
Thersites the Historian
Published 4 Sep 2021In this video, I provide an analysis of the opening sections of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ History of Rome, discussing where his place in the historiographical tradition and the goal of his work.
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