News from Elsewhere
Phil Sandifer very kindly asked me to contribute a guest post for his site. Here it is. I’m quite proud of it.
It’s about Merlin, strangely enough… but me being me, I ramble off topic.…
Phil Sandifer very kindly asked me to contribute a guest post for his site. Here it is. I’m quite proud of it.
It’s about Merlin, strangely enough… but me being me, I ramble off topic.…
Jack Graham, of Shabogan Grafitti, asked me a month or so ago if I’d seen Merlin. I said I hadn’t, but it was on the list to cover before Season Two of Sarah Jane Adventures. He then proceeded to tell me how appalling it was, and I decided that I’d rather read him writing about Merlin than actually watch it.
Logan Locksley helps fill in a needed gap.
The year is 1996. It’s a leap year. As usual for a year on Earth, all sorts of things are happening. Independence Day, Twister, and Mission: Impossible are among the highest grossing films of the year. Musical hits include Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something, Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai, and Amish Paradise by Weird Al Yankovic. In other news, a chess computer called Deep Blue defeats world champion Garry Kasparov for the first time, the Nintendo 64 console is released, and France performs the last atomic bomb test.
Andrew Hickey writes on Final Crisis. His book on fifty years of Doctor Who, Fifty Stories for Fifty Years, is available from Amazon, Amazon UK, and, for print editions, Lulu. You’ll also probably enjoy the interview he just did with me for Mindless Ones.
Abigail Brady will get the sole power to decide if you ever get to see me play Soldeed. She is also responsible for starting the entire Chelsea Manning feud on Wikipedia by moving the article to its correct title. Beyond that, she’s invaluable for checking random facts about London for various projects and is an Iron Man villain. She also happily stepped in for a guest post on short notice. She is, in short, one of the five greatest people never to be Verity Lambert.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: what’s the connection between Phonogram and Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf other than on November 17th, 2013 I went straight from seeing a panel discussion containing the writer of the first to a performance of the second? After all, one is a comic taking an adult perspective on the someone from the middle of nowhere in the West Midlands’ teenage obsession, whereas the other… is the exact same thing but in plural.
I could never have written this post as well as Richard Jones, and so I asked them to step in for a guest post. This is one of the best decisions I have made in the course of this project.
Fairly early in the process of writing this blog I realized that it was useful to have some prior context for a given story before writing an entry on it. And so I bought the About Time books, which are fabulous and were my anchor for several stories in the classic series about which I’d have had little interesting to say on my own. But I was also, early on, aware that I was eventually going to hit the new series and there would be no About Time to help me.
The solution, I realized, was to get a friend hooked on Doctor Who so they would blog about it and I could just take off on their posts. Unfortunately for me, the friend I chose was Anna Wiggins. The problem with Anna, you see, is that she is vastly more clever and intelligent than I can ever hope to be, and so when my blog hits Series Six, about which she has blogged extensively, I am going to abruptly be found out as the pathetic fool I am and all of my readers are going to, quite correctly, go follow Anna instead. Oops.
In order to ease the transition to all of you abandoning me in favor of my smarter and far cooler friend, I thought I should get a guest post from Anna about the relationship between the Doctor and Odin. And so I did.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, several Germanic tribes migrated to England. And they brought their gods with them. The British isles would be settled, resettled, and invaded by many peoples over the next several hundred years. The bones of Britain contain traces of dozens of cultures, and many of those cultures were Heathen.
To be clear, I’m using ‘Heathen’ in a fairly specific and uncommon sense. Prior to the encroachment of Christianity, a similar worldview and set of religious beliefs was practiced widely across Northern Europe and Scandinavia. The Romans termed these people ‘heathen’. So, I am using the term ‘Heathen’ to refer to this basic religious system, which largely included the same gods, myths, and folk legends. The more commonly known term for this religious system and worldview is ‘Norse’, as in ‘Norse Mythology’. But that is a misnomer – in practice, the same basic set of beliefs and practices held sway throughout northern Europe, and included, at various times, various parts of the British Isles. (I will also mention ‘modern Heathenry’ in the course of this entry – which is a reference to the reconstructionist religion that revives the worship of the Heathen gods)
And so, in the late 1980s, Doctor Who began to draw on these Heathen bones of British culture. The Seventh Doctor was cast as an explicitly Odinic figure, and this vision of the Doctor operating in a Heathen mode would have a lasting influence on the show.
Odin is widely known as the ‘chief god’ of the Heathen pantheon, and as a ‘god of war’ and, if you have a particularly verbose summary on hand, maybe a ‘god of secrets’ or a ‘god of wisdom’.…
Among the ways in which the end was prepared for is that I, suspecting that the Logopolis post would maybe take a bit longer to write than most, decided to secure a guest post for today. Not wanting to leave you in the hands of anyone other than the best, of course, I asked Chris O’Leary of the fabulous Pushing Ahead of the Dame, which was quite rightly one of Time Magazine’s 25 best blogs of 2011.