chapter-3-section-3.html
3.1: “riverrun:” 1. “rive:” English for “to split.” 2. river: French for “to join.” FW is a book of “Doublends Jined” (20.16). (Some other candidates: French reverrons (we’ll see, or meet, again); French rêvrons (we will dream); German erinnerung (memory: echoing “mememormee” (628.14)); “Reverend,” in some versions the beginning of the FW letter. As an Anglican dean, Jonathan Swift would have been addressed as "Reverend," or some version.) Also, “river run:” a pre-FW term meaning either the natural course of a river or of a voyage taken on it. Also, spawning salmon are typically said to be “running” upriver, and in some places this is called a “run” named after the river in question, for instance the “Columbia River Run.” Also, as Guy Davenport notes in Every Force Evolves a Form, French riverain, “riverside,” is “a quotation from Napoleon’s will,” “asking that he be buried near the banks of the Seine, as he is, in the Invalides church.” Much of the last page of FW, leading to this first word, is based on the finale of A Royal Divorce: the dying Josephine, in France, telepathically addressing the simultaneously dying Napoleon, on St. Helena. (Dramatic license: their deaths were years apart.) A Royal Divorce was a hugely popular play in the Dublin of Joyce’s time and later; see notes to the report of its performance near the beginning of I.2. 3.2: “us:” continues first-person plural narrator (“we,” “us” (628.12, 13)) of last page 3.2: “commodius:” Gibbon (and others) date the beginning of Rome’s decline and fall (see “The fall” at .15) from the reign of Commodus. Gibbon: “The act of Marcus Aurelius, in handing over the civilized world to the mercy of the young savage whom he believed to be his son, resulted in more misery than any other crime recorded in human annals.” (Note: according to McHugh, but not the “Selected Variants” of the Oxford FW, the word should be “commodious,” which would underscore Commodus’s odiousness. "Commodious" also occurs in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, which Joyce read; there as perhaps here as well, it results from a mistaken reading of the text. Your annotator, making no claims to competence in genetic studies, will occasionally note such alternatives when they seem most likely to be pertinent.) 3.2: “vicus:” the first sentence of Saint Patrick’s Confessio says that his father’s father lived at “uico [vico] bannauem taburniae.” “Vico” is the dative of vicus. Its exact meaning for Patrick – area of a city, street, town, estate, country seat (English “vicus” according to the OED, favors the first) - has been much discussed and disputed. The word derives from the Greek οίκος, which, whether as family, family descent, family property, or family house, was the basic unit of Greek society. 3.2-3: “recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs:” I agree with E. L. Epstein, in A Guide Through Finnegans Wake (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009, p. 26, hereafter “Epstein”), that this marks the point that the Liffey tide, flowing out to sea at the end of FW, changes direction – starts to recircle, clockwise and westward. The time, on the first page as on the last, is approximately 6:00 a.m. About twelve hours later, at the dusk of I.8, it will be heading out to sea. At 261.5, at a point sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m., “we [are] haply return[ing]” upstream, “Hencetaking tides.” At 415.18, after midnight, it is “a high old tide.” Later, on page 426, at some time between midnight and 1:00 a.m., the tide is turning: a “tide shackled” barrel floating on the Liffey, “necklassoed,” topples and swirls around, losing its balance, and rolls “buoyantly backwards” (426.20, .27, .28, .34). (Joyce described the action of III.1-3 as "a barrel rolling down the river Liffey.") At 457.17-26, some time between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m., it is “tiding down.” On the last two pages, it is approaching the “prongs” (628.5) of the two breakwaters extending into Dublin’s harbor, with the “bitter” taste of Irish sea in its mouth (627.35). The Liffey is ALP, who in this passage informs us that her destination is the Old Lord” of the (“promnentory”) promontory, (623.4, .6), that is, “Howth Castle and Environs.” 3.4-14: “Sir Tristram…aquaface:” annotator’s editorial: this seven-stage sequence, summing up the dreamer’s life, may relate to the tradition, mentioned in Ulysses (Bloom in “Hades:” “See your whole life in a flash”) that someone drowning has his past life flash through his mind. On FW’s last page we were heading out to sea and frightened at the prospect (628.5: “Save me from those therrble prongs!”). Since this page is a continuation of that one, the past is prologue: the seven-stage sequence is both compressed memory and compressed prophecy of FW. The seven stages are definitely repeated at 104.10-14 and, I believe, also at 126.16-24, 589.20-590.3, and to some extent, at 175.7-28. According to the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It, a man’s life has seven stages. 3.4: “Sir Tristram:” 1. Sir Thomas Lipton, tea magnate and famous sailor, was sometimes called “Sir T.” or “Sir Tea” by the press. The FW letter ends with a tea stain, and the book’s last word, “the,” is French for tea, minus the accent. 2. Large statement: what Mozart’s Don Giovanni is to Ulysses, Wagner’s Tristan and Iseult is to FW. The Wagner opera's much-discussed opening is the “Tristan chord,” in Joyce’s time and ours often cited (and sometimes disputed) as bordering on atonality. 3:4 "violer d'amores:" by way of (see McHugh) viola d'amore. Tristram is a renowned harpist whose music charms all who hear it. Also, see 3.6, first entry: "Sir Tristram"'s first name was Amory. As the man who stole Iseult away from her husband King Mark, Tristram/Tristan was a lover and a violator of filial trust. A viola d'amore has seven strings, and FW’s male principal HCE is routinely identified with seven, especially with the seven articles of clothing he wears. 3.4: “the short sea:” OED: a “short sea” is choppy, with short waves. “Short-sea” refers to short sea crossings. “Short-sea traders” cover short distances, for instance across the English Channel. 3.6: “his penisolate war: see McHugh. As one of Strongbow’s company, Sir Amory Tristram won the Battle of the Bridge of Ivora, on the Howth peninsula, in 1177. Also, the Battle of Évora, in 1808, in the Peninsular War 3.6: “penisolate:” 1. penis. 2. Pen, which he is wielding (“wield the pen” is a common expression), and which is mightier than the sword. 3. “Penicillate:” meaning tufted like a brush – instrument for another kind of artist. 3.7: “topsawyer’s:” a topsawyer is the master or leader of any profession. 3.8: “laurens:” Amory Tristram changed the family name to Saint Lawrence. Perhaps also reference to Saint Laurence O’Toole (5.3), Archbishop of Dublin in 1077 3.9-10: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick:” 1. As Adaline Glasheen showed, 3.1-14 sounds all the names of Joyce’s immediate family, as well as grandson Stephen (“past Eve and” (3.1)), named for Joyce’s self-portrait Stephen Dedalus. James is “Jhem” (.13), Giorgio is “gorgios” (.8), Lucia is in “bellowsed,” Nora is in “nor a voice.” “Afire” may be a tribute to the “auburnt streams” (139.23-4) of Nora’s hair. 2. “Avoice from afire” is a voice from afar – specifically, coming as a telegraph signal over the wireless, for instance from ship-to-shore “marconimasts” (407.20). This commences a major FW motif: Tristan and Iseult communicating by wireless, she ("mishe mishe") with the Morse code for “i,” he ("tauftauf") with a doubling of the one-dash Morse code for “t.” (Note that "mishe mishe," two dots, has two "i"s, that "tauftauf" has two "t"s. "These signals often duplicate metrical pyrrhics (two unaccented syllables, as signaled by the two dots above the two "i"s) and spondees (two accented syllables, as signaled by the two dashes that cross the verticals of the "t"s). 3. As the third clause of the seven-clause sequence of 3.3-14, this corresponds to the third major set piece of FW I.1, the prankquean episode of 21.5-23.15, in which the female visitor repeatedly lights a fire. Your annotator thinks that the first two clauses correspond as well, respectively to the Waterloo “museyroom” episode of 8.9-10.23 and to the “Mutt” and “Jute” exchange of 15.24-18.16. 4. Your annotator also thinks – a disputable, and disputed, reading – that FW includes a literal voice from a fire, that the FW dreamer’s room has a fireplace from which the dreamer hears or imagines he hears the voice of his daughter, coming down the flue from her own fireplace in her bedroom, directly upstairs. In this reading, “tauftauf” would signal the turf of a peat fire, “a spurtfire turf a’kind o’kindling when oft as the souffsouff blows her peaties up” (117.17-8). A (“bellowsed”) bellows is used to fan a fire. 3.13-4: “rory end:” red end; orient: red is one end of the rainbow’s spectrum, here touching down in the east. 3.15-7: “(babab…thurnuk!):” as McHugh documents, this first of FW’s ten thunderwords includes “thunder” in several different languages. According to Vico, language began when humans, scared by the sound of thunder, tried to imitate it with speech. (Joyce was scared of thunder.) Also, the word “barbarian” supposedly originated as a Greek imitation of the language of non-Greek-speaking outsiders. 4.2: “Brékkek Krékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax!:” as McHugh notes, this is sound of frogs croaking, from Aristophanes’ The Frogs. In Ireland, frogs mate – and therefore croak – in late winter and early spring. 4.8: “a toll, a toll:” given context (war, killing everywhere) a bell tolling for the dead; goes with “apeal” of .7 4.7: “Sanglorians:” aside from French for Without glory (here, presumably in war); sanglot, sob. (Goes with “larms” – alarms, but also larmes, tears – on same line.) Also, a deliberately off-key note sounded by a bugler playing a funeral taps; an example was at the funeral of John F. Kennedy. 4.9-10: “What bidimetoloves sinduced by what tegotetabsolvers:” Joyce’s work, including FW, is full of suspicions of the lecherous intentions of Catholic priests, particularly in the confession box - here counterpointed with Herrick’s poetic pledge to convert to Protestantism for love (Herrick was a Cavalier). The gist of this section is that untoward romantic alliances – chance cuddlings – often happen during wartime. 4.10: “their’s hayair…strawng:” hay foot, straw foot: marching orders given to bumpkinish soldiers; occurs (jokily) in Portrait, chapter one. Other than that the Empire in question was a music hall, no one seems to know the point of the song line, frequent in FW, “There’s hair, like wire, coming out of the Empire.” Here it is assimilated into the story of Jacob’s pretending to be Esau, the “hairy man.” See next entry. 4.11: “voice of false jiccup:” Isaac: “The voice is the voice of Jacob.” “Jacob” is a cognate of “James.” Like Jacob, James Joyce was the second-born male of the Joyce family, but the firstborn John died in infancy, bestowing primogeniture privileges on James. Implications will recur throughout FW’s ongoing Jacob-and-Esau thread. 4.11-2: “met the duskt the father of fornicationists:” American expression for having died in combat or some other conflict: he bit the dust. Perhaps pertinent that Odysseus, who is certainly a fornicator, meets his father in a public road covering his head with dust. 4.14: “fanespanned:” finespun – probably describing appearance of Milky Way and constellations. A “fane” is a temple. 4.14: “soft advertisement:” according to Google Books, the first occurrence of “soft sell,” meaning gently suggestive advertising, was in 1923. Long shot: from 1925 to 1934 the ("eyeful") Eiffel Tower (.36) was a brightly-lit advertisement for Citroen. (It had displayed skysigns (.14) advertising other products before; OED’s first entry for “skysign” in this sense is 1887.) Several of Joyce’s residences in the FW days were in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower. 4.16: “none so soon:” none too soon 4.19-20: “rushlit:” a rushlight is proverbial for being faint and inconspicuous; can also suggest poverty. 4.21-4: “he sternely struxk his tete in a tub for to wasch the future of his fates but ere he swiftly stook it out again…the very water was eviparated and all the guenneses had met their exodus…:” Joseph Addison’s The Spectator, number 94, refers to a story from a 1708 volume entitled Turkish Tales about a sultan who plunges his head in a tub of water and pulls it out to find himself in a strange land where he is forced to earn his living and start a new life. A part of the story appears in Dickens’ Hard Times, Book II, chapter 1. 4.24: “the guenneses had met their exodus:” made their exodus: the geese had flown. Probably an allusion to Ireland’s Wild Geese, exiles who served in foreign armies 4.27: “Thorp:” ME for agricultural village 4.28: “Annie:” and he 4.30: “Oftwhile balbulous:” Oft/often while drinking or (here) having drunk (bibulous); the Finnegan of the song is often drunk. 4.30: “mithre ahead:” the contraption that makes for the head of a hod resembles a carpenter’s mitre. 4.31: “ivoroiled overalls:” rainproof overwear is/was sometimes called “oilskin”(s); overalls would signify an outdoor manual laborer. 4.35: “waalworth:” Sir William Walworth: Lord Mayor of London, who killed Watt Tyler. Listed by Adaline Glasheen in her Third Census of Finnegans Wake (University of California Press, 1977, p. 301 – hereafter “Glasheen”). As mayor, he erected a (“entowerly” (.36)) tower on the banks of the Thames. In a passage describing HCE at his most eminent, it may be pertinent that Dick Whittington’s highest aspiration, and achievement, was to become thrice Lord Mayor of London. 4.36: "eyeful:" eye-full: a complete view - as in, "Get an eye-full of that." 5.1: “celescalating:” New York’s Woolworth Building included escalators (a relatively new invention) as well as elevators. 5.2: “bush abob off its baubletop:” in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, the architect Halvard Solness, who has a fear of heights, falls to his death while trying to place a ceremonial wreath on top of the tower of his latest building. (Perhaps changed to a bush because, as McHugh notes, a bush signified a pub; HCE is a publican.) 5.3-4: “larrons o’toolers clittering up and tombles a’buckets clottering down:” Laurence O’Toole and Thomas à Becket were both assaulted before the main altar of Canterbury Cathedral; O’Toole got back up and survived; Becket was mortally wounded and remained fallen. (Much of the language describing the structure here seems apt for a cathedral.) 5.4: “bare arms:” in other words, roll up his sleeves to get to work 5.6: “Riesengeborg:” rising gorge – i.e. about to throw up – in this case from all the boozing 5.6-8: “His crest…second:” compare 546.4-11. In his 1986 book Joyce and Heraldry, Michael O’Shea reported that he could not locate an Earwicker coat of arms; as of 2019 Google had two sites purporting (these sites are not always trustworthy) to show one: aside from being crowned with a horned (bull’s, not goat’s) head, it seems to have little in common with the FW descriptions. 5.7: “poursuivant:” the he-goat is pursuing the (female) “ancillars.” 5.7: “horrid:” in original sense of bristly, shaggy 5.8: “helio:” presumably an heraldic image of the rising sun – a feature of some coats of arms 5.8: “of the second:” heraldic term; refers to the second “tincture” (color) to have been specified – in this case, “argent.” 5.9: “Hootch:” aitch, i.e. H. As in a child’s lesson: A is for apple, B is for ball…H for husbandman 5.13: “agentlike:” anciently 5.13: “thundersday:” according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (from now on designated as “Brewer”), Thursday was sometimes called Thundersday. 5.14: “Our cubehouse still rocks:” Kaaba and Black Stone; compare .16. 5.16: “muzzlenimiissilehims:” Muslim muezzins, chanting (Muslim) hymns; “ii” is always or almost always a token of Issy, here perhaps as the two girls in the park, blackening HCE’s name with their account of his wrongdoing. 5.23: “bedoueen:” Bedouin 5.23-6: “Cropherb…Heed!:” Muhammed is said to have ridden various animals; one was a talking donkey – a male – descended from a line used by prophets, going back to the one Jesus rode into Jerusalem. 5.23-4: “crunchbracken:” compare “crackling canebrake” of “Circe:” the crackly sound made by walking through bracken, also the eating sound made by donkey, "no friend of carrots" (476.15) 5.26: “Heed! Heed!:” Here! Here! 5.26: “may half been a missfired brick:” Mrs. Maybrick, husband-poisoner mentioned in “Penelope.” "Missfired" may mean 1. imperfectly made in the fire of the kiln, causing the brick structure to crumble or collapse, leading to his fall. 2. a brick thrown by someone, which missed. 3. a brick thrown by a "miss." 5.31: “fargobawlers:” “Faugh a ballagh!” In “Nausicaa,” Bloom’s version of the warning sounds made by ocean liners. Gaelic for “Clear the Way;” was battle cry of the Royal Irish Fusiliers. 5.33: “circuses:” given context, perhaps traffic circles (roundabouts) 5.33: “wardsmoats:” wordsmiths 5.33: “basilikerks:” given context, perhaps overtone of bicycles 5.34: “peeler:” British policeman 6.1: “blightblack workingstacks:” smokestacks blackened and blighted with soot 6.5: “thurum:” perhaps “thrumming” sound of city, machinery 6.7: “under his bridge:” proverbial locale for paupers 6.10: “the latter:” that is, from the wall 6.11: “when a man merries his lute is all long:” perhaps: to make merry, especially for romantic purposes, especially especially if marriage is desired, a man should bring his lute along. (As the McHugh citation shows, the consequences of success can be dispiriting.) 6.14: “a trying thirstay mourning:” a dry and thirsty morning: both “dry” and “thirsty” mean in want of alcohol. 6.14: “thirstay:” for a death on Thursday, the burial would probably occur on a Monday. Standard interval was three days – also the usual time for an Irish wake - but there were no funerals on Sundays. (Note: if, as I will be proposing throughout, the default FW date is Monday, March 21 (1938), Thursday would be March 17 – Saint Patrick’s Day, traditionally a time for the kind of alcoholic overindulgence, for instance by "all the hoolivans of the nation" (.15), which brought about Tim Finnegan’s fall, hence his wake.) 6.15: “all the hoolivans of the nation:” Brewer: “The original Hooligans were a spirited Irish family of that name…in Southwark toward the end of the 19th century.” 6.16: “duodisimally:” as McHugh notes, duodecimally – almost certainly because the pub’s customers are twelve in number 6.17: “citherers:” zithers? 6.18: “gianed:” Gog and Magog (.19) were giants. 6.19: “the round of them agrog:” grog – liquor – was being passed around 6.22: “stiff:” dead; drunk; dead drunk 623: “dacent:” “decent” with a conspicuously Irish accent 6.24: “his pillowscone:” legend that the stone of Scone was the “pillow” on which Jacob rested his head when he had his vision of angels 6.24: “tap up his bier:” as in, to tap a keg of beer 6.25: “deepbrow:” Keats, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer:” “deep-brow’d Homer.” Also, deep-down: this is the bass section; Adeste Fidelis (.25-6) is in a higher register. 6.26: ”a bockalips…guenesis:” Revelations (Apocalypse) and Genesis are at opposite ends of the Bible. 6.28: “Tee the tootal:” teetotal 6.28: “twoddle of the fuddled:” waddle of the befuddled (with drink) 6.31: “on the flounder of his bulk:” on the flat of his back (McHugh) - with an assist from “flat as a flounder” 6.31: “babeling:” babbling babe 6.32: “see peegee ought he ought, platterplate:” see pg. – page – eighty-eight, on the plate. The photographic plate following pg. 88 of A. Moret’s Rois et Dieux D’Egypt (Paris, 1911) depicts Osiris on his back, with an upright erection, approximating the horizontal version of HCE’s E siglum. I owe this datum to Mark L. Troy. 6.33: "Hum!:" here as elsewhere, it is probably pertinent that "Hum" is Mesopotamian for "I, me." (Source: W. H. Downing, Digger Dialects, edited by J.M. Arthur & W.S.Ramson, New York: Oxford University, 1990, 245, hereafter Digger Dialects) 7.1: “swimswamswum:” singsangsung – probably originating with “singsong” 7.2: “delldale dalppling:” perhaps daedal plus dappled 7.3: “(O carina! O carina!):” four “tricky trochees” (.3) 7.4: “issavan essavans:” Brendan O Hehir reads this as Gaelic for “Vanessa is his wife.” Swift was rumored to have secretly married Esther Johnson (Stella) but not Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa). 7.4: “patterjackmartins:” compare 86.2: “padderjagmartin.” Comparing the two, the sense seems to something like “chatter,” bordering on “blarney.” 7.4: “all them ins and ouses:” combination of “all them” and the dropped h of “houses” indicates a lower-class speaker. 7.5: “tum:” given context of slapdash musical performance, perhaps as in “tum-tee-tum-tum-tum.” 7.7: “pool the begg:” pull the bell, presumably to summon servant or waiter to start the meal. Servants not in the vicinity were signaled with bell-pulls. 7.7-8: “pass the kish for crawsake:” pass the fish for Christ’s sake. (Servants or no servants, this is not the language of refined table manners.) Many dinners began with fish. Probably pertinent that a fish is a symbol of Christ. “Craw:” slang for stomach 7.10: “baken:” Dounia Bunis Christiani (Scandinavian Elements of Finnegans Wake, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965, p. 90, hereafter “Christiani”) suggests Danish bakken, hill 7.16: “almost rubicund:” as a color, salmon is pinkish – almost red. 7.17: “he is smolten in our mist:” he is smitten in our midst. (Sounds biblical; isn’t.) 7.17-8: “woebecanned and packt away:” what the British call “tinned” food, American call “canned.” See 170.27: Shem’s preference for “salmon tinned.” 7.20: “Yet may we not see still:” no question mark, but still: a rhetorical question 7.20: “brontoichthyan:” see McHugh. In Joyce’s time and mine, Brontosaurus (thunder-lizard), today renamed Apatosaurus, had been, according to the textbooks, the largest or almost-largest of the dinosaurs – so large that (like, at times, the FW giant), because of the time required for nerve-system signals to cover the distance, it required two brains, one at the head and other at the tail. May set up later conceit that HCE’s sons come from his two focal points, above and below the waist. Contemporary physiology had shown that the body’s two great bundlings of nerves were at the head and the genitals. 7.22: “lean:” lien 7.23: “flags or flitters:” rags or tatters 7.24: “sundyechosies:” Sunday clothes. Cited here as opposite extreme from “reekierags,” reeking rags 7.28-9: “Seeple Isout:” Chapelizod, site of FW, location of the Mullingar House. Joyce's father had once worked in the distillery situated in Chapelizod and frequented the Mullingar House. In 1927, Joyce sent interviewers to his father in Dublin to collect memories of both. In 1933 Joyce's artist friend Frank Budgen visited Chapelizod, interviewed the proprietor of the Mullingar House, and made a picture, sent to Joyce, called The Liffey at Chapelizod, supposed to give "a sort of key to the FW associations." (The picture is now in the collection of the James Joyce Center in Zurich.) The following, from Thom’s Directory, summarizes Chapelizod as of 1910, six years after Joyce left for Europe and one year after his last visit. CHAPELIZOD, a village partly in Palmerstown parish, Uppercross barony, but chiefly in the parish of the same name, Castlerock barony, Dublin county, three miles W. from the General Post Office, Dublin, comprising an area of 53 acres. Population, 1280, inhabiting 255 houses. It is partly situate on the river Liffey, on the high road to Galway, and near to the Great Southern and Western line of Railway. It is said to derive its name from la belle Izod, daughter of King Aengus. King William III spent several days in it; and prior to the erection of the Viceregal Lodge, it was the country residence of the Viceroy. Its buildings are, a Church of Ireland Church, with an ivied tower, a Convent of Mount Sackville, where over 60 boarders and over 100 day pupils attend, a Roman Catholic Church, a Dispensary, a National School, and Metropolitan Police Station, also Postal and Telegraph Office. Electric tramway starts from Conyngham-road. Following, with original capitalization and punctuation, are some of the listed names and places which may be pertinent to FW. Places: NORTH SIDE CHAPELIZOD CHURCH OF IRELAND, Rev. Amylrald Dancer Purefoy, M.A. Incumbent Chapelizod National School – Mr. James Reidy, Master Chapelizod Parochial Male and Female Schools – Mrs. S. O’Donovan, Mistress CHAPELIZOD R.C. CHURCH – Rev. J.P McSwiggan, P.P.; Rev. E. O’Reilly, c.o.; Rev. J. Cahill, c.o. The Convent (Order of St. Joseph), Mount Sackville Chapelizod Parochial Male and Female Schools – Mrs. S. O’Donovan, Mistress The Convent (Order of St. Joseph), Mount Sackville Drummond Institute for Orphan Daughters of Soldiers, Mulberry hill – Miss Rouselle, matron Metropolitan Police Station – Robert Bell, sergeant Mount Sackville Convent – Rev. Mother Gabriel, superioress Mullingar Hotel – Keys, Mrs. Phoenix Park Distillery – The Distiller’s Co [illegible], whiskey distillers – G. Robinson, manager St. Joseph’s convent, Mount Sackville SUB-POST OFFICE—Miss Margt. Fitzpatrick, sub-postmistress SOUTH SIDE A WALL LETTER-BOX at Palmerston Mills and at Boundary villa Dispensary for Palmerston District – Dr. G. McMahon, medical officer Royal Irish Constabulary Station -- P. Donovan, sergt. In charge Persons: NORTH SIDE Broadbent, Mrs. Robt. Glenthorn Caulfield, L, family grocer, purveyor &c. Caulfield, Mr. I, The Tap Davis, Mr. sergeant D.M.P. Duffy, Mr. A. Quarryfield house Gillman, Wm. G., tavern, Park lane Halpin, Thos., vintner Hands, Mrs. C., Martin’s-row M’Whirter, J. W. tailor, Garden lodge Saunders, Miss Mary, New Holland iron mills Smyth, Mr. P. D.M.P. SOUTH SIDE Anderson, J. relieving officer, Mountain view Finnegan, Mrs. Teresa, prov. dealer, Bridge house Ging, C., Grocer, &., Bridge Inn Healy, Timothy M. esq. K.C., M.P., Glenaulin Maycock, Elizabeth, Sabine-terrace Walker, Miss P., vintner, Kildare Tavern Walters, M., L.B.C.P. and S. I. medical officer Some comments, corresponding to the order of appearances just given: The “ivied tower” of the Anglican Saint Laurence’s Church is at least twice noted in FW: “yon creepered tower of a church of Ereland” (264.31; ivy is a “creeper” plant), and “sainted lawrels evremberried” (264.26; ivy has berries). Police station (556.23-6), Great Southern and Western train line (604.12), and “Electric tramway” (81.7) also put in appearances, especially the last one: at 378.9-10 the “-traumconductor”’s tram is heard shooting out lightning bolts from its overhead wire. Clearly, Joyce’s knowledge of Chapelizod was acute. Again, it was reinforced by having his father interviewed for memories of his Chapelizod days and by having Frank Budgen do a black-and-white picture of the Mullingar House and surroundings. It would seem that he also consulted Thom’s. As noted elsewhere, the Mullingar Hotel’s “Mrs. Keys” may contribute to “The keys to” of 628.15. Although the Phoenix Park Distillery is described as “disused” in “A Painful Case,” as of 1910 it was still in operation. (FW seems to confirm: “Tam Fanagan’s weak yat is still’s going strang” (276.21-2.)) Thom’s has its valuation as 400 pounds. For “sub-postmistress,” compare “Miss Enders, poachmistress and gay receiver” (412.23-4). As Glasheen notes, FW’s letter’s sender is sometimes a Miss Enders. Mrs. Broadbent is presumably the widow of the Robert Broadbent, who died in 1905, remembered by Joyce’s father from his days of carousing in Chapelizod’s Mullingar House. “Broadbent” - in Ireland, an uncommon name - appears in the John Joyce interview. An 1883 edition of Tom’s includes four Broadbents, one of them a “hotel keeper.” The two Caulfields are presumably co-proprietors of “The Tap.” I can’t find any other notice of this establishment, but the name suggests a pub, and it would be in keeping for the time if it were also a “grocer, purveyor &c.” (See note to 78.12-3.) Note C. Ging, “Grocer, &c. of the “Bridge Inn,” where the Mr. Duffy of “A Painful Case” eats and drinks. Along that line, of course, one notices “Mr. A. Duffy” of “Quarryfield house,” although Joyce’s Mr. Duffy, resident of Chapelizod, is named James. “Hands, Mrs. C:” “Nancy Hands” (244.20) was the proprietress of the Hole in the Wall Pub, Phoenix Park. She was enough of a local celebrity for the 1859 song “The Irish Sporting Car” to include her in a run-through of Dublin-area landmarks. One wonders if this Mrs. Hands was related by way of marriage. The Chapelizod of FW definitely includes a tailor’s shop. Mr. J.W. M’Whirter fills the bill. “Mrs. Teresa Finnegan” of “Bridge house:” is her “Bridge house” affiliated with the Bridge Inn? It all seems too perfect. “Mrs. Finnegan” is a character in the song “Finnegan’s Wake.” On the other hand, FW occurrences of Teresa/Theresa aren’t particularly suggestive. As Glasheen notes, Tim Healy, Parnell’s betrayer, was Joyce’s version of Judas. His Chapelizod residence, in FW named “Healiopolis” (.24.18) and “Heliotropolis” (594.8), is valued at 80 pounds, not quite the highest rate among Chapelizod’s private residences. Elizabeth Maycock: FW has “Lissy Mycock” (538.20). Maybe a coincidence “Walker, Miss P. vintner, Kildare Tavern:” Louis O. Mink’s A Finnegans Wake Gazeteer has all FW “tavern”s as referring to the Mullingar House. Miss Walker’s establishment may complicate the issue. And what, come to that, of Wm. G. Gillman’s “tavern?” In any case, there seem to be six drinking establishments and one distillery, for a population of 1208. (In Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Sexton’s Adventure,” Chapelizod has a “half dozen ‘publics.’”) FW is a boozy book. That Chapelizod was a venue for Dublin bonafides (see, e.g., 178.18) may have something to do with it. 7.29: “The cranic head on him, caster of his reasons:” probably by analogy to “caster of spells,” the head being the center of reason; see note to .20, above. 7.30: “verdigrass:” green grass: seen “swarded” in mist, an early instance of FW’s glaucoma theme, which typically begins with greensightedness. As verdigris, a sign that some structure or monument – the Statue of Liberty is an example – has been around for a while. 7.31: “fellonem:” felon. (One thing clear about the male protagonist is that he is guilty of something.) 7.32: “sisterin shawl:” in “Cyclops,” “shawls” are prostitutes. 7.34 “bagsides:” backside. (Maybe obvious) 7.34-5: “Ill Sixty, ollollowed ill…bom, tarabom, tarabom:” during WW I, Hill Sixty was mined, undermined, tunneled, hollowed out, and eventually blown up; by the time Joyce was writing these lines it was a crater. Because the Connaught Rangers played a major role in the action and suffered heavy casualties, a mound in Croke Park was, ironically, given the name. In some accounts "Hill Sixty" signifies the Croke Park Massacre of Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920, when British troops opened fire on civilian spectators at a football match. Compare the next two entries. 7.34-5: “tarabom, tarabom:” “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay:” musical hall song; popular in WW I. Had jingoistic associations, here ironic. Probable overtone of "bomb" 7.36: “proudseye view:” bird’s eye view. Fits the context: we are here getting a long-distance prospect from the other side of the region of the clouds. The Croke Park Massacre was initiated when an airplane flew over the statdium and gave the signal to open fire. 8.1: “Wallinstone:” incorporates Albrecht von Wallenstein, Austrian general in the Thirty Years War; there is a collection of portraits and memorabilia called “the Wallenstein Museum.” Otherwise, a combination of Wellington Monument in Dublin, Wellington Museum in London, and Wellington Museum in Waterloo, originally named Waterloo Museum. Most of the details to follow come from the last of these. To further complicate, there was once a Waterloo Museum in the Hyde Park area of London. Also, see note to 3.1. 8.3: “quitewhite villagettes:” Plancemont and Mont Saint Jean were the two villages (aside from Waterloo itself) involved in the battle. “-Ettes,” either/both feminizing/diminishing them, brings in the jinnies. 8.3-4: “hear…gigglesomes minxt:” hearing them, the minxes, urinating (from Latin mingō) – a signature feature of the sin in the park. In general, the Waterloo sequence is, even for FW, heavy on infantile bathroom humor. “Loo” is an English idiom for toilet, and the most famous word to come out of the battle was Cambronne’s “Merde.” 8.5-6: “Welsh and the Paddy Patkinses:” Wellington’s army included both Welsh and Irish units. 8.6: “Paddy Patkinses:” P.P.: parish priest – presumably why they’re allowed in free 8.6-7: “Redismembers invalids of old guard:” dismembered (and re-dismembered) veterans of Waterloo – that is, those “mutilées par la guerre” – the last time I remember, still a Paris Metro inscription enjoining special treatment to French veterans wounded in battle. Les Invalides gets its name from its origin as a hospital for wounded soldiers, for instance Napoleon’s Old Guard. 8.8: “janitrix:” that is, portress. (Fitting if her husband’s name is, as I think it is, Porter. At 27.2 he will be a “janitor”, and at several points will be identified with Janus, Roman god of doorways.) Overtone of genitrix would seem to associate her with ALP, the book’s archetypal mother; still, as far as I can see, there is no sign that Kate is a mother. Possibly relevant that Nora had been a convent portress in Galway 8.9: “goan:” Goa, in India, figured in Wellington’s India campaigns 8.10: “Willingdone:” Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done” 8.11, 13: “ffrinch:” Brewer, on “ff” for “F:” “Its modern use is an affectation.” See also 296, Fn. 1, 392.15, 495.27, 607.31; “ttrinch” at 9.19 is probably a play on the same thing. 8.12: “the cap and sorracer:” as best as I can determine, there is nothing in the Prussian flag of the period that might reasonably be compared to a cup and saucer, or an article of headwear, or a sorcerer. Perhaps pertinent that the holdings of the London Wellington Museum include fancy tableware; see also “silvoor plate,” .31. 8.14: "Bullsfoot!:" compare "Bullsear!" (9.24), "Bullsrag! (10.15), and "Bullseye!" (10.21), with notes. Here, perhaps because preceded by "bullet," "byng," Bull," and "bang" (8.12-3): see the "bullsfooted bee" of 120.6, with McHugh note. 8.15: “pike and fork:” pikes and pitchforks were sometimes used as weapons by Irish rebels. 8.15: “triplewon hat:” a hattrick: three goals in one game. Napoleon’s hat was a bicorn, not a tricorn. According to Wellington, the sight of Napoleon’s hat on the battlefield was worth 40,000 troops. 8.16-7: “This is the Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape:” “harse:” horse’s arse. (Along with the usual irridentist reasons for resenting Wellington, see 10.17-8 and note.) Both Wellington’s Copenhagen and Napoleon’s Marengo were named for notable victories of their riders. A fixture of the most memorable scene of A Royal Divorce, here being performed, was a white horse, ridden on alternate nights by the actors playing either of the two. Compare the “Copenhague-Marengo” of 232.16, at the outset of what is to some extent another staging of the play’s Waterloo enactment. Performances also included a “Pepper’s Ghost,” for which compare McHugh’s note to 214.15-6, where one of the washerwomen is apparently remembering those two prominent features of the spectacle, white horse and Pepper’s Ghost, as one “ghostwhite horse of the Peppers.” 8.18-21: "grand and magentic...wartrews:" the first example of an HCE signature: seven different articles of clothing. By Celtic custom, the number of different colors one could wear was determined by class, starting with one for servants, up to seven for monarchs. 8.22: "living detch:" aside from the "living death" of combat, three battlefield landmarks: 1. the "sunken lane" or "ravine" which, according to Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (historians disagree), was the beginning of the end for Napoleon at Waterloo: a charge of the French cavalry, unaware of its presence ahead, plunged in, with the bodies of horses and men crushing and suffocating one another. Hugo's mournful poem about Waterloo appears at 541.22. 2. the "sunken road" in the midst of no-man's land at the First Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916. Any soldier, British or German, who tried to take shelter in it became an easy mark for gunners, and like Hugo's "sunken lane" it filled up with corpses. Later FW mentions are "sukinsin of a vitch" (437.29-30) and "sunken rut" (478.14). 3. in general, the trenches of, especially, WW I. They appear in a number of FW battle scenes, for instance as the "sunksundered lines" of 349.15. 8.23: “inimyskilling:” enemy-killing 8.29: “Grand Mons Injun:” the angel or angels of Mons, originally a story by Arthur Machen about mysterious angels coming to the aid of the beleaguered British at the Battle of Mons, the first major battle of WW I. It was widely believed and became a prominent piece of WW I lore. In some versions, the angels are bowmen, shooting down enemy troops. Also: Mons was a British outpost during the Battle of Waterloo. 8.30: “crimealine:” Kremlin 8.30: “sheltershock:” it was in WW I that shellshock came to be recognized as a debilitating symptom arising from prolonged exposure to battle. 8.31: “jinnies:” camp-followers, provocateuses. A good deal of the Waterloo sequence is a matter of the two men, Wellington and Napoleon, trying to measure up to the presence of the jinnies. 8.31: “legahorns:” lanthorns (According to OED “lanthorn” is a folk etymology for lantern, whose translucent sides were often made of horn.) The Wellington (Waterloo) Museum in Brussels features the wooden leg of Lord Uxbridge, who lost the original in what became a famous anecdote of the battle. 8.35: “tallowscoop:” kitchen device, according to one description, “for pouring melted tallow into candle molds.” Resembles a long spoon with the bowl tapering at the end. As telescope: like the penis, it can be extended from original, compacted, size, in this case due to the provocations of the jinnies. It will put in another appearance at 178.27-9, where Shem "did take a tompip peepeestrella throug a threedraw eighteen hawkspower durkdicky telescope,"with "draw," as defined by the OED, being "a tube fitted inside another through which it can slide." Wellington's was a four-draw telescope, with magnification power of thirty. 9.1: “phillippy:” lippy philippic. Continues as “out of his most,” after which McHugh and Oxford editors both recommend inserting “toocisive bottle of Tilsiter. This is the libel in the battle.” That is, the libel in the bottle: perhaps the first sign of FW’s “letter,” which is frequently a letter in a bottle. “Libel” would be both a libel in, and label on, the bottle: in III.1-3, the postman Jaun, bearing the letter, is a waterborne barrel of Guinness, including the yellow Guinness label. (“Bottle of Tilsiter” may include overtone of Pilsen/Pilsener beer.) Napoleon signed two Treaties of Tilsit, one with Russia and one with Prussia, in both cases from a decisive position of strength, in both cases very much to his imperial advantage. 9.1: “me Belchum:” James Belcher was a 19th century prizefighter who resembled Napoleon; the “Belcher” handkerchief of 37.29 is named after him. 9.3-4: “Dispatch in thin red lines:” “Red tape” originally denoted the ribbons used to tie up dispatch boxes. See 9.12, below. 9.4: “shortfront:” short front: military term for a front (as in “western front”) which is relatively - well - short. Waterloo was an example; by and large the battles of WW I were not. 9.5: “Leaper…frow:” see translation in McHugh. Under the circumstances, any question about some enemy’s wife would be taken as slur on her virtue, probably with the implication that the questioner had slept with her. 9.5: “Hugacting:” in light of the above, probably a sexual innuendo: hugging and acting huge. (Molly Bloom’s Blazes Boylan is really named Hugh.) Ironically pertinent that it is signed by the famously underendowed Napoleon, throughout this sequence contrasted with the “Willingdone”/Wellington of the flagrantly phallic Wellington Monument 9.6: “tictacs:” speculation: a game of tic-tac-toe may be underway. At 9.3-4 a cross is marked on one of the horizontal lines. Although a number of items following could be taken as O-shaped, none seems to me to be definite. 9.8: “is gonn:” have/has gone. Given the context, “is” may signal Issy; in any case, it certainly signals Maude Gonne’s daughter Iseult, to whom Yeats proposed after being turned down by the mother. 9.8: “boycottoncrezy:” boy-crazy, a popular term in the twenties. (As was, of course, girl-crazy.) It would follow that the “lipoleums” at this moment are female, or at least female-ish. (And, again, Napoleon was rumored to have been either androgynous or genitally underdeveloped.) In any case, their attentions to Willingdone do give him an erection. 9.9: “git the band up:” to get the wind up: to become extremely nervous 9.9-11: “This…Willingdone:” British historians of Waterloo have been hard on the performance of the Belgian army. “Belgians not to be trusted” reads one dispatch included in Wellington’s memoirs. Among other things, the Belgian forces were berated for disobeying Wellington’s order to attack the French at Quatre Bras. Apparently the contrast here is with Blucher, who famously told his soldiers that he had to attack because he’d given Wellington his word; the Belgians have broken theirs. 9.10: “bode:” Gaelic bod, penis. 9.10: “bonnet to busby:” female headwear to male headwear – the two are close together; possible sexual innuendo, as in “belly to belly” 9.10-11: ”with a ball up his ear:” with a flea in his ear. Can mean a number of things, but in all cases the hearer has been set off by something told to him. 9.11: “up his ear:” up his rear (or rere): buggery 9.11-2: “Willingdone’s hurold dispitchback:” dispatch sent back by Wellington, in a hurry. Wellington’s Waterloo dispatches to his forces were famous as examples of coolness under pressure; not so in the case of Napoleon, whose confusing dispatch to Grouchy may have cost the battle. A painting in the Wellington Museum, which Joyce probably visited, depicts Wellington writing his report of the battle; a dispatch box is in the foreground. Also: William the Conqueror and King Harold: note “hastings” at .2-3. 9.13: “Figtreeyou:” in many versions of the story, William Tell keeps one arrow in reserve, tells Gessler that if he had missed the apple and killed his son this arrow was “For you!” Also, “making figs” – Italian obscene gesture of contempt, occurs in Inferno. 9.13: “Ayi! Ayi! Ayi!:” call of distress; also Aye-aye, Yes, yes, as in “Aye-aye, sir,” answering .4’s “Yaw, yaw, yaw!” – Yah, yah, yah. Also the tradition that Greek “Ai! Ai!” is written on the hyacinth, preserving the dying cry of Apollo’s beloved 9.14: “Voutre:” as foutre, plus vous, a franglais "Fuck you." Also voutre le camp: can mean either telling someone to get lost or that someone buggered out. See note to .9-11. 9.16: “stampforth foremost:” best foot foremost 9.17: “drink a sip, drankasup:” Nursery rhyme: Cross-patch, draw the latch, Sit by the fire and spin; Take a cup, and drink it up, Then call your neighbours in. 9.19: “ffrinch:” see note to 8.11, 13, above. 9.19: “mistletropes:” missile troops. Fought in WW I 9.19-20: “Canon Futter with the popynose:” the “Pope’s Nose machine gun” was a weapon in WW I. Also, poppies were a symbol of the WW I dead. (See note to 17.18.) The soldier also has a bright red-orange (poppy-colored) nose because he has been indulging in drink for a hundred days. “Canon” reinforces the pope in “popynose.” 9.18-9: “Rooshious balls:” Russian cannon balls, to go with the “Canon” of .19. (There were no Russian forces at Waterloo, nor, as far as I can determine, was there any significant Russian weaponry.) 9.20: “hundred days’:” allusion to Napoleon’s Hundred Days, ending at Waterloo 9.21-2: “jinnies in the bonny bawn blooches:” girls in pretty white blouses. Pertinent that French blouse is pronounced “blooz.” 9.22: “rowdy houses:” surprisingly, I can find no instance in which this signifies anything disreputable – neither bar nor brothel. It just means a place, the Houses of Parliament for instance, where order is not being maintained. 9.24: "Bullsear!:" depending on performance, toreadors are awarded one or two ears of the killed bull, sometimes the tail too. 9.25: “solphereens:” sulfur is an ingredient of gunpowder. Probable overtone of “smithereens” 9.26: “Almeidagad!:” Almighty God!” 9.29: "dowan a bunkersheels:" from W. H. Downing, Digger Dialects - A Collection of Slang Phrases used by the Australian Soldiers on Active Service: "doing a bunk" - WW I slang for "runnng away." The jinnies are "rinning away" (.28). Hereafter, this source will be given as Digger Dialects. As noted elsewhere, some of the items cited are included have been identified by Ian MacArthur and Geert Lernout in Issue 18 of Genetic Joyce Studies. 9.32: “cool:” O Hehir: Gaelic cúl, pronounced “kool:” bottom-most part; similar to French cul, anus 9.32: “poor the pay:” French:” “pour le pays!,” for the country!” Probably echoes Kipling’s popular poem “The Absentminded Beggar” (mentioned in “Scylla and Charybdis” and “Penelope”), urging that civilians “Pay, pay pay!” the mustered-out army beggars from the Boer War. 9.34-5: “branlish his same marmorial tallowscoop Sophy-Key-Po for his royal divorsion on the rinnaway jinnies:” brandishing his penis, pissing on the jinnies. (See 10.13 and note.) Also, Finn McCool’s dog was named Bran. 9.34-5: “Sophy-Key-Po:” “Sauve quit peut!,” these words, shouted out by the French troops - generally taken as the moment when the battle was definitely lost 9.35: “royal divorsion:” A Royal Divorce: see 32.3 and note. Also, the military tactic of a diversion 9.36: “Dalaveras:” scrambling of (Eamonn) De Valera 9.36: “fimmieras:” Gaelic fimida: pig’s tail. Goes with “porca”/pork (.36) 10.4: “nice hung bushellors:” sexual meaning of “hung” was current in Joyce’s time. Again, by report, just what Napoleon was not 10.05: “lipsyg dooley:” Yankee Doodle; also, possible overtone of “Mr Dooley,” character created by American journalist Finley Peter Dunne, basis of Joyce’s poem “Dooleysprudence” 10.6: “hinndoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy:” shadowy third party, here, as “hinndoo,” combining “hinnessy” and “dooley” (.4, .5) – fair-haired and dark-haired - who sometimes appears with the twins, for instance: “shinners two and pinchme, our tertius quiddus” (465.18). The twins are frequently signaled by the numbers three and two, in either order; here they are alternately two persons or three. Joyce once said that he could mentally grasp any two of the three persons of the Trinity, but not all three, at one time. 10:8: “threefoiled:” defiled; also, as McHugh notes trefoil / shamrock; anticipates II.3 story of Irish sod being defiled by Russian General 10.8-9: “bluddle filth:” Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “In the midst of peace, the Roman troops familiarized themselves with the practice of war; and it is prettily remarked by an ancient historian who had fought against them, that the effusion of blood was the only circumstance which distinguished a field of battle from a field of exercise.” \10.9: “waxing ranjymad:” waxing (raging) mad, at the British Raj. Compare next entry, note to .14-5. 10.9: ‘bombshoob:” bombshell. Long shot: the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was sparked by reports that cartridges were greased (waxed?) with the fat of sacred animals. In any case, the “Hindoo” feels that he has been insulted by the British. 10.13: “tailoscrupp:” Krupp, German munitions manufacturers. Along with similar outfits, sometimes blamed for WW I 10.13: “waggling his tailoscrupp…upjump and pumpim:” literally, a pissing contest. Willingdone is waggling his penis, either to spray in all directions or to shake off the last drops before buttoning up. The “hinndoo” is (see McHugh), pumping ship, urinating right back at him. Echoes, I suggest, the beginning of “Nausicaa,” where the male histrionics of the previous chapter are telescoped down to two little boys, one of whom has wet his pants, fighting over a sand castle, and of the pissing contest recalled in “Ithaca.” 10.14-5: “the hinndoo seeboy:” the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, against British rule. Also, as "seeboy" (compare .15, .19), an early instance of FW’s Peeping Tom theme – a boy, seeing, in this case probably Noah’s son Ham, cursed (“the cursigan Shimar Shin” (.18)) for seeing his father’s “harse,” his naked backside. Ham was traditionally the founder of the dark races, which by contemporary standards would have included Indians. FW’s Semitic Shem sometimes incorporates Ham as well. 10.15: “Hney, hney, hney!:” the sound a horse makes. (Too obvious? In any case, a horse has been mentioned in the preceding line.) “Hn-” spelling is probably owing to Swift’s Houyhnhnms. Also, Marshal Ney (McHugh) was Napoleon's captain of cavalry at Waterloo. Horseless, the lipoleums are desperately, after the manner of Richard III, asking him for a horse. (The "Culpenhelp" of 10.13 identified the white horse on the field as Wellington's Copenhagen, even though Napoleon's was in fact the white one.) 10.15: "Bullsrag!:" as in red flag, or rag, to a bull 10.16: "upjump:" Digger Dialects: upstart, interloper - as in the more familiar phrase "jumped-up." The sepoy, insulting Wellington/Willingdone, is, among other things, being bloody impertinent. Ironic that, as McHugh notes, this includes a famous line from Wellington; pertinent that Willingdone was viceroy of India when British rule was being challenged 10.17-8: “bornstable gentleman:” born gentleman. In making him a “big white harse,” Irishman Joyce has been paying Wellington back for his nasty crack (recorded by McHugh) that being born in Ireland didn’t make him Irish, any more than being born in a stable made one a horse. (Correction: this story is apparently apocryphal.) 10.19: “dooforhim:” do for him: put an end to him, which is what they are doing to "Willingdone" and his horse 10.21: "big white harse. Tip (Bullseye! Game!):" a bullseye is a point-blanc shot, from the (blanc) white circle at the center of an archery target. 10.26-7: “for the lamp of:” for the love of 10.26-7; “for the lamp of Jig-a-Lanthern!:” in “Scylla and Charybdis,” a “light of love” is an Elizabethan prostitute. Perhaps pertinent that a jack-o-lantern’s light is, if not red, reddish. 10.27: “candlelittle:” jack-o-lanterns are lit by candles. 10.28-11.1: “And numbered…crows:” a clutch of talismanic FW numbers: 29 (“quaintlymine”) for Issy and the girls; 54 (“fifty I spot four”) for ALP’s age; 12 (“a runalittle…pelfalittle”) for the twelve customers; “seven,” HCE’s invariable number of clothes; 23/32 (“pigeons pair…three of crows”), for the twins: see note to .6. 10.32: “gnarlybird:” accounts of the Waterloo scavengers are especially horrific: some killed the wounded, stripped the corpses naked, pried out teeth for what came to be called the “Waterloo teeth” of the denture market; their numbers included both men and women. 10.34: “bleakbardfields:” Field of Blackbirds – name for the Battle of Kosovo, 1448 10.35-11.02: “wrothschields…our pigeons pair are flewn for northcliffs. The three of crows have flapped it southenly, kraaking of de baccle:” refers to the legend that Nathan Rothschild got first news of the British victory at Waterloo via a carrier pigeon and invested accordingly. 10.36: “Our pigeons pair:” pigeon pair: boy and girl twins – from the belief that pigeons always sit on two eggs, one of girl chick and one of boy 10.36: “ontorsed:” unhorsed 11.1-2: “de baccle:” debacle – for Napoleon, that is 11.2: “kvarters:” quarters, in sense of designated areas, military or otherwise 11.3: “on shower:” unsure 11.4: “flash:” tastelessly showy – here when he’s out on the town with “Nixy” girls 11.7: “Fe fo fom:” “Fee Fie Fo Fum:” man-eating giant’s chant in “Jack and the Beanstalk” 11.21-2: "moonled brooches with bloodstaned breeks in em:" menstruation: monthly moon-led broachings leaving blood in the "breeks," slang for "breeches." Compare 212.16, where ALP gifts "ilcka madre's daughter a moonflower and a bloodvein." The ("bloodstaned") bloodstone was supposed to have the magic property of stanching bloodflow. 11.13: “But it’s armitides toonigh, militopucos, and toomourn we wish for a muddy kissmans to the minutia workers:” given that it is to be followed by a “muddy kissmans,” this “armitides” is probably the armistice of November 11, 1918. The “minutia workers” are the munitions makers who many blamed for the war. “Mud” was a recurring word in descriptions of WW I battles; generals had sent soldiers to fight in what amounted to quicksand. Also, the muddy field of Waterloo caused Napoleon to postpone his attack – yet another explanation sometimes given for his defeat. 11.17: “burrowed:” borrowed 11.19: “rattlin:” short for “ratline.” OED: “One of the small lines featured horizontally on the shrouds of a vessel, and serving as steps by which to go up and down the rigging.” 11.20: “flasks:” standard issue for British soldiers 11.21-2: “moonled brooches with bloodstained breeks in em:” McHugh and Oxford editors both suggest “bloodstaned,” which would reinforce the “stone” component. Bloodstone/heliotrope is typically dark green with flecks or streaks of red resembling blood stains. This is apparently the first FW mention of the heliotrope; it will become a major feature of II.1. There as here, it is sometimes paired with the moonstone or pearl – lambently diffuse light contrasted with sun-seeking helio-trope. In “Telemachus,” “breeks” is slang for breeches, here stained with blood. 11.22: “nightgarters:” British knights, Order of the Garter 11.23: “nickelly nacks:” knickknacks 11.23: “foder:” fodder, as in gun or cannon fodder 11.24-5: “ills and ells with loffs of toffs and pleures of bells:” he’s and she’s with lots of (male) toffs and plenty of (female) belles; perhaps extended (.26) with “hart” (male) and “fairest” (female, as in “the fair sex”) 11.27: “cearc:” cert. Compare “Aeolus:” “dead cert” 11.27-8: “With Kiss…Undo lives ‘end. Slain:” out of sequence, but seems to incorporate elements from wedding ceremony: “till death do us part;” kiss; congratulations. Followed by “truetowife” (.29) 11.28: “Slain:” 1. Gaelic Sláinte, To your health. 2. English slain, killed – the battlefield dead. FW equal-opposites 11.29: “bootifull:” dutiful, beautiful 11.36: “Troysirs:” trousers 12.2: “citters to cit in:” in “Aeolus,” “cits” is slang for “citizens.” 12.3: “let young min talk smooth:” the expression “smooth talker” usually refers to salesmen (“min”/men) or (again, “min”/men) seducers. 12.7: “under liquidation:” legal term: bankrupt’s property being sold to pay off debts 12.8: “nare:” ne’er 12.8-9: “nare a hairbrow nor an eyebush on this glaubrous phace:” compare 3.13-4: “rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.” “Eyebush:” eyebrow. “Glaubrous:” combination of “glabrous” (hairless) and “glaucous” (pale green) – an allusion to Joyce’s glaucoma 12.11: “turfwoman:” in “Two Gallants,” a woman who has become a prostitute is said to be “on the turf.” 12.13: “beardsboosoloom:” The Tempest I.2, 50: “dark backward and abysm of time” 12.19: “fruting for firstlings and taking her tithe:” like a mother bird, rooting – for instance for worms – to feed her young, keeping some for herself. “Firstlings” can be either first-born (baby birds are “nestlings”) or a first crop. 12.20: “two mounds:” the feet of the buried giant 12.22-3: “swishawish satins and taffetaffe tights:” compare 3.9-10: “mishe mishe to tauftauf:” a recurring FW motif 12.26: “shortlegged bergins:” Compare “little Alf Bergan,” a character in Ulysses who, according to Ellmann’s biography, was based on a real person of that name. 12.27: “Corkhill…Ivor’s:” Louis Mink: “The following five ‘Hills’ are all sts [sites] in cen Dub [central Dublin]. Olaf Rd and Sitric Rd are just N [north] of Arbour Hill, and Ivar St is two blocks further N.” 12.29-31: “every crowd has its several tones…each harmonical:” as McHugh notes, the preceding list has included a sequence of string instruments. 12.31-2: “Olaf’s on the rise and Ivor’s on the lift:” “rise:” steps. “lift:” elevator. 12.33: “scraping along:” dismissive way of describing what players of string instruments do 13.2: “One sovereign punned to petery pence:” “petery” as in “peters out:” the pound has been diminished to a few pennies. (The pun here probably just amounts to equating one kind of “sovereign” (the king, as in “Royally”) with another (pound, as in “punned”). 13.6-8: “outwashed…house:” first appearance of the calendar picture – a.k.a. almanac picture - on the pub’s wall. I haven’t been able to ascertain any one candidate, but Edwin Douglas’ Mine Host, available on Google Images, is a good example of the type: hunter on horseback, surrounded by hunting dogs, at the door of an inn, being served a “stirrup cup,” Irish deoc an dorais, by a young woman, apparently the daughter of the innkeeper looking contentedly on. “Stirrup cup” scenes were routinely the first in a series of “hunting prints,” of the kind that Leopold Bloom’s father displayed on the wall of his hotel, depicting the stages of a fox hunt from start to the kill. Note: as far as I can tell, FW uses the terms “almanac picture” and “calendar picture” interchangeably, although the former occurs more frequently. Almanac pictures were included in yearly “Christmas almanacs” and meant to be framed and displayed – in places like pubs, for instance. Calendar pictures, one for each month, were the kinds of pictures still seen on wall calendars, and, of course, were also displayed. Both were proverbially pretty, but almanac pictures were especially known for their sentimentality. In Ulysses, the maudlin Halcyon Days hanging in Gerty McDowell’s outhouse is an almanac picture, and when the narrator of “Cyclops” says that Bloom belongs in an almanac picture, he means that Bloom is being mawkish. The picture is mentioned often throughout FW and at times prompts or joins in the action. These appearances will be noted as they occur; some examples: 191.5-8, 194.6-12, 245-35-6, 310.22-30, 334.31-6, 379.3-6, 387.33-5, 512.4-6, 561.12-4, and 622.23-32 13.8: “innkempt house:” that is, unkempt house, that is, disorderly house, that is, house of prostitution. The charge is an early instance of the simmering hostility toward HCE. 13.13: “Lokk:” Loki, the prankster of Scandinavian mythology 13.14: “old butte new:” hill of Howth, seen anew 13.14-5: “mausolime wall:” lime, as used as cement in making a wall 13.18: “lichening:” listening 13.19: “pretumbling:” pretending 13.22: “baile’s:” Baile Átha Cliath: Dublin 13.24: “um. T.”: umpty: slang for unimaginably large number; rhymes with Humpty (Dumpty); compare 345.18: "getting umptyums gatherumed." 13.24-8: “Unum…polepost:” the four items listed correspond to FW’s family: 1. father, an authority figure (alderman), likened to a mountain (Ben Bulben); 2. mother, an old woman, identified with Ireland’s national (female) personification; 3. daughter, a maid with auburn hair (like Nora Barnacle’s), pining for a lost lover whose name is some variant on “Brian;” 4. twins, the penman and postman. 13.30: “popeye:” Adaline Glasheen has this as the “I yam what I yam” Popeye (compared 604.23); given context, it also seems right for a pope opposed by an antipope. 13.31-2: “cycles of events grand and national:” the Grand National, a popular race held in Liverpool in March. It will figure prominently in II.3. 13.33: “1132:” about this canonical number, some possibly pertinent observations. 1. As noted above, the twins are repeatedly associated with the numbers 2 and 3, in either order. Issy is repeatedly associated with two matched verticals, as in 11. 1132 is compounded out of the numbers 1, 2, and 3, and 3 is the number of the triangular ALP. 1+1+3+2 = 7, which is HCE’s number. It consists of four integers in all, and the Joyce family consisted of four persons. “1132” may thus encompass the FW family, fading in and out of focus with the Joyce family. 2. The traditional founding date of the Roman Empire is 753 B.C. Estimates of its last year vary, but one candidate is 378 A.D, when, according historian Alessandro Barbero in his The Day of the Barbarians, the Battle of Adrianopole “marked the end of the Roman Empire.” Barbero quotes contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus that the empire’s history ended with that defeat, “as if it had come to a full stop.” 753 + 378 = 1131; add 1 for the B.C. – A.D. skip (10 B.C. to 10 A.D. is 21 years, not 20) and the result is 1132. During the two years following, Theodosius declared Christianity the official religion and began the persecution of pagans; the Nicene Creed, still today the foundation of most Christian denominations, was proclaimed and made official. At the same time, the creed initiated Christianity’s “Great Schism,” over the filioque disagreement. In another schism, Theodosius officially became the last to rule over both Rome and Constantinople. (The Byzantine Empire lasted 1123 years – close to Rome’s record. 1132, I suggest, may be FW’s definition of a millennium, the maximum length of time that any human institution can survive. Except, that is, for the Roman Catholic Church, as Joyce would have pointed out.) In this context, it seems pertinent that the “commodious” of 3.2 is clearly an allusion to Commodus, the emperor who according to Gibbon and others, initiated Rome’s – indeed humanity’s - decline and fall. (And that the words “The fall” occur thirteen lines later, essentially beginning FW’s narrative; see note to 3.2.) 3. In Irish history, a number of FW’s major historical players were at least around: Henry II and Laurence O’Toole were both born in 1132. In the same year Dermot MacMurrough, Ireland’s anti-Christ and Benedict Arnold, sacrilegiously razed the Abbey of Kildare – supposed to have been founded by Saint Brigid, along with Patrick one of Ireland’s patron saints, and thus a site of special veneration – raped and abducted its abbess, and established himself as King of Leinster, thus setting in course the events which resulted in the 1169-1170 invasion by Strongbow (born 1130), at Henry II’s behest. (In “Desmond: The Early Years, and the Career of Cormac MacCarthy,” Irish historian Henry Allen Jeffries writes, “Had Connacht’s supremacy not been so decisively ended in 1133 [as a result of MacMurrough’s actions begun in 1132] it is conceivable that the course of Irish history could have taken a radically different turn.” Other contemporaries prominent in FW include Thomas Becket (born 1118, assassinated 1170) and Roderick O’Connor (born 1116, died 1198: his death was the basis for Joyce’s first piece of FW writing; it evolved into most of the last page of II.3.) Also, the four old men of FW II.4 are given to frequent reminiscings about the A-list English who got drunk and drowned in the voyage of the White Ship, in 1120. Other events in the vicinity include Thomas of Britain’s Tristan, considered the first written version of the Tristan legend, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittanniae: both appeared around the middle of the twelfth century; both contributed material to FW. 4. Campbell and Robinson suggest that 1132 combines 11, the number of rebeginning (because starting another round of decimals) with 32, the number of the fall (because, as Bloom remembers in Ulysses, falling objects accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second per second). 5. Long shot: Roman numeral 1132: MCXXXII. With some squinting, may resemble a coded misspelling of (Finn) McCool: MCoooll. McHugh reads 566 and 1132 as multiples of 283 A.D., year of Finn’s death. Of these options (and there are others) I would rate number 3 above the rest. More often than not, FW’s 1132 has to do with time – either a date or a specific duration - and an inordinate number of the persons and events associated with Ireland’s version of the fall seem to cluster around that date. As far as I know, the first person to make the case for 1132 A.D. was “the Riverend” Clarence R. Sterling (“Foriver For Allof – The Ravisht Time A’Bride,” 2001), who among other pertinent details notes that in raiding the Kildare abbey McMurrough extinguished the fire first kindled by Brigid in 484 A.D. (hearths and hearth fires are among Brigid’s attendant emblems), that Kildare figures prominently in FW’s accounts of Irish calamities, and that Brigid’s feast day of February 1 corresponds to Imbolc, the Irish equivalent of our Groundhog Day, February 2, because supposed to be midway between winter solstice (usually December 21) and spring equinox (usually March 21). February 2, Candlemas, was Joyce’s birth date; Sterling makes a plausible case that FW sometimes finds ways to combine the two. Changes and recalculations of calendars complicate matters, but in one version the date in question would be midway between the darkest day of the year, Saint Lucy’s Day, after whom Lucia Joyce was named (Saint Lucy is patroness of those, like Joyce, suffering from blindness or other eye afflictions) and March 21, Nora Barnacle Joyce’s birthday. Also, this: again, the traditional date of Rome’s founding is April 21, 753 BC. Nora Barnacle, again, was born on March 21, 1884. Skipping the BC-AD year (Caesar Augustus, born September 23, 63 BC and died August 19, 14 AD, was 75, not 76, at the time of his death) 753 + 1132 = 1884. Your annotator believes that the FW default date is March 21 – that, having set his previous book on the day of his first date with Nora, Joyce went on to commemorate her birthday in his next book. 13.34-14.15: "1132…Dublin.:” the four vignettes follow the sequence of 13.24-28: father, mother, daughter, twins. These four items, clearly related to Joyce's immediate family - father, mother, daughter, son - show up in others of FW's microcosmic lists, above all, 3.4-14, although the order of the children can vary, and in fact Joyce's son Giorgio was born before his daughter Lucia. 13.33-4: “groot hwide Whallfisk:” great white whale. Joyce’s knowledge of American literature was spotty at best, and so far as I can tell there are no other signs of Moby Dick in FW or elsewhere. On the other hand, Adaline Glasheen finds several references to Billy Budd, and FW was written during the years when Moby Dick was being rediscovered and recognized as a classic. If this is an allusion to Melville’s book – the exceptionally reliable J. S. Atherton thinks it is - its significance here eludes me. 14.1-2: “look it:” looked (provincial accent) 14.2: “sothisfeige:” Gaelic feighill: herd cattle 14.2-3: “cowrieosity:” in some cultures, the cowry shell represents a vagina, about which heterosexual males are unappeasably curious. 14.4: “illigant:” illegitimate. Giorgio and Lucia were illegitimate. 14.7: “brazenlockt damsel:” with bronze-colored locks of hair. Compare 13.17: “auburn mayde.” Nora had auburn hair. 14.8: "Puppette her minion:" both child being delivered and Malay pepet for vagina 14.9: “Puropeus Pious:” puerperal: relating to childbirth – especially puerperal fever, a dangerous fever sometimes contracted during childbirth. Along with "Bloody," in the same line, suggests a painful and perilous delivery. Joyce's writing, especially "Oxen of the Sun" in Ulysses, reflects a lifelong fascination with obstetrics, mindful of the "Genesis" curse that woman shall bring forth in pain and inclined to take it as a comment on God, not Eve; the "therrble prongs" of the last page (628.5) may, among other things, signal a forceps delivery. Pontius Pilate killed Mary's son. 14.9 “Puropeus Pious:” Pontius Pilate 14.12: “Caddy and Primas:” cadet: second (or later) born, after first-born Primas; perhaps given in reverse order because of Jacob and Esau story 14.14: "o peace a farce:" Omega, Alpha - again (see previous entry) in reverse. "Caddy" is the writer, using the alphabet from first letter to last - his "Blotty words" (.14) are ink, blotted. May be pertinent that FW goes from last page to first 14.18: “billy flood:” billy club 14.18: “sultrup:” satrap: can mean either ruler or ruler’s functionary; perhaps with admixture of “sultan” 14.20: “banged pan the bliddy duran:” banged upon the bloody door 14.22: “marks:” German unit of currency. (Maybe obvious) 14.28: “farfatch’d:” far-fetched 14.31: “gloamering:” glimmering gloaming 14.33: “returned viridities:” that is, the green leaves and grass of the new, returning spring 14.34: “herb trinity:” popular folk-name for pansy 15.5: “chiliad:” a thousand years 15.5: “brittled:” battled 15.7: “have thrown up:” have given up on something; here, have relinquished that something – “jerrybuilding” - to someone else, “the Kevanses.” Elsewhere in FW, Jerry and Kevin are Shem and Shaun, respectively. 15.7: “jerrybuilding:” jerry-built: made cheaply and sloppily 15.23: “be troth!:” betroth, truthfully 15.24: “Lave a whale a while in a whillbarrow:” compare 13.33-5. 15.26: “Tim Timmycan timped his, tampting Tam:” copies rhythm of beginning of “Finnegan’s Wake:” “Tim Finnegan lived in Watkin Street.” 15.30: “joebiggar:” Jupiter, disguised as a beggar, perhaps from Ovid’s story of Baucis and Philemon 15.31: “hoagshead:” hogshead: large cask. Occurs in Huckleberry Finn 15.32: "mammamuscles:" this is apparently the first of FW's instances of stuttering. (Others to follow: "mahan" (16.1), "prapsposterus" (16.3), "Noho" (16.15), "a stun a stummer" (16.17), "Has? Has at? Hasatency?...Boohooru! (16.26), ("mine mines" (16.27), "rimimirim" (16.28) and "Louee, louee!" (16.33). With one exception ("hauhauhauhaudibble" (16.18)) - see the note to this line - they will, in the following exchange, all come from the "Mutt" character, who attributes the onset to some traumatic experience - a battle (Clontarf or Waterloo), or the ("coyne" (16.31)) coin, with its engraving of ("Cedric Silkyshag" (16.34)), Sitric Silkinbeard, the Danish invader defeated in the battle, which reminds him of Clontarf. (The coins issued by Silkinbeard after the battle (see McHugh) included his likeness.) Joyce's Notebook VI.B.17.063, transcribed and reviewed by Daniel Ferrer in Issue 15 of Genetic Joyce Studies, includes excerpts from Arthur Chervin, Bégaiment et autres maladies fonctionelles de la parole, which attributes onsets of stuttering to such traumatic events, and gives two examples - a boy who jumped from the window of his burning house, a girl who was terrified by being locked up in "un cabinet." 15.33-4: “slaking nuncheon out of some thing’s brain pan:” compare “Cyclops:” “lovingcup of firstshot usquebaugh…from the skull of his immediate predecessor.” 15.35: “Comestipple:” come tipple, i.e. drink; Sackerson is often represented as drunk. 15.35: “Sacksoun:” Saxon; perhaps also echo of Falstaff’s favorite drink, sack 15.36: “pouriose:” Pluviôse: month beginning late January in French Revolutionary calendar. See next entry. 16.1: “froriose:” given Pluviôse, probably a combination of Ventôse and Fructidor, French Revolutionary months beginning late February and late August, respectively 16.2: “overstep his fire defenses:” firestep: step in trench on which gunners would stand while firing. See note to 341.9. Mainly associated with WW I, but, as “firing step,” was feature of fighting during the Boer War. See next entry. 16.3: “kraals:” Afrikaans for cattle pens; term became current in Britain during Boer War. Here, the fencing is made of bones. 16.3: “prapsposterus:” something like: perhaps post us toward…Dublin’s post office. Along with Nelson’s Pillar, which stood opposite in the middle of Sackville Street, it was considered the city’s center, the point from which other locations were measured. See next entry. 16.3-4: “pillory way to Hirculos pillar:” McHugh suggests “billowy:” a sea-going trip to Hercules’ Pillars (but why only one pillar? And which one?). As trip to Nelson’s Pillar, this may echo the song “The Rocky Road to Dublin.” 16.4: “fool porterfull:” the entrance to the “museyroom” was supervised by a “janitrix;” the entrance to Howth Castle will be guarded by a “dour;” in I.2 the male principal, eventually HCE, is a turnpike-keeper; here we have “fool porterfull.” I suggest that the name behind all these versions is “Porter,” a door-keeper. 16.5: "chorley guy:" compare 8.22 and note. The "Chorley Pals," commemorated in a monument at the site of the Battle of the Somme, were one of the "Pals Brigades" promoted by the British military before the imposition of conscription. Chorley is a town in the English midlands. Military-age men from the such towns were urged to enlist as a group with the promise that they would all serve together, as pals, in the same unit. One result could be the near-total liquidation of all of a town's young men. This happened to Chorley. Mutt and Jute are remembering, along with Waterloo, the battles of WW I, with its "fire defenses," piles of bones, and "blooty creeks" (16.2-9); 17.17-30 includes an account of the annual Armistice Day commemoration in London's Royal Albert Hall, with its million poppy petals falling to the ground. 16.10-18.16: “Jute…mud:” aside from being a comic strip, Mutt and Jeff were characters in a series of animated short features, especially popular in France, from before 1920 and well into the sound era. In my voicing, this takes about six minutes to read through – approximately the regular length of such features. 16.11: "neck...sutton:" the "isthmus" - neck - of the Sutton ("penisolate") Peninsula (3.6) is adjacent to the site of the Battle of Clontarf and was the site of raids involved in the action. 16.18: "What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing:" see 15.32 and note. "Jute"'s only case of stuttering, perhaps by way of imitation, voluntary or involuntary. Chervin lists both - the former as mockery, the second "par une sorte de contagion morale." 16.17-20: “Mutt…surd:” compare 8.20 and note: he is suffering symptoms from shellshock, first identified and named in WW I. 16.21: “poddle:” bottle. (I think that FW’s letter – therefore, eventually, FW itself – is a message in a bottle.) 16.24-5: “Become a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you:” in other words: wise up; try to be as smart as I am. 16.26: “Has? Has at?:” panicky mishearing of “as if” (.24) 16.27: “I trumple from rath in mine mines:” the Battle of Rathmines, 1649, was a disastrous defeat for Irish forces supporting Charles I; it allowed Cromwell to land and commence his murderous campaign. 16.29: “One eyegonblack:” at the Battle of Hastings, Harold was killed when shot in the eye with an arrow. Also: for a period of FW’s composition, Joyce wore an eyepatch. 16.31-3: “sylvan coyne, a piece of oak…wooden:” aside from Wood’s halfpence, “wooden nickel” is an Americanism for a worthless counterfeit coin. As “sylvan,” the coin is either/both silver and/or (by way of woods/woodsy) wooden. 16.35: “Old grilsy growlsy!:” probably by way of associative chain: Clontarf = Battle of Clontarf = Brian Boru = Bruin = bear = growling grizzly bear. In “Circe” Bloom uses the jokey term “friend Bruin” for a bear. The whole string is prompted by a coin bearing the image of Brian Boru, who is frequently depicted and described as wearing a bearskin (“bitskin” (.24)) greatcloak. Brian Boru’s image appears sometimes on ancient Irish coins, also on a one-crown coin minted in 1910. As a bear, “poached on in that eggtentical spot,” he anticipates the Russian general, shot in II.3. 16.35: “bar:” Dublin slang for sovereign, either coin or banknote 16.36: "He was poached on in that eggtentical spot:" "poached" and "egg-" because this is where Humpty Dumpty had his great fall. 17.4: “wholeborrow:” compare “whillbarrow” (15.24). 17.6: "brookcells:" overtone of Bruxelles (see McHugh) helps identify the battle as Waterloo, fought on the outskirts of Brussels. 17.8: “norse:” nose noise; “Norse” as Viking 17.9: “bull…roarum:” Answer to question of what kind of noise he made: like the sound of a roaring bull; like a blast of the Norseman’s horn; like a bullroarer, a noisemaker used in Druid ceremonies; like this (imitates sound); like snoring 17.12: “Brian d’ of Linn:” Brian O’Linn: cant for gin 17.15: “rutterdamrotter:” Rotterdam 17.15: “Onheard of:” unheard of; absurd 17.18-29: “roundward this albutisle…whirlworlds:” Albert Hall, remembering the annual November 11 ceremony in which approximately a million poppy petals, one for each English soldier killed in W W I, are dropped from its ceiling, settling “flick as flowflakes" (.27-8). (Still a heart-piercing sight: you can see it on YouTube: "Armistice Day Albert Hall.") Also, of course, Alba Isle: Britain. Note “P. O. P.” – as in “poppy” - in 17.30. “Roundward?” Albert Hall is round, inside and out. 17.19: “ours:” in military context: our regiment 17.19-24: “where wone…brack:” were wont to call to one another, like a whimbrel (high whirring sound) to peewee (named for the sound of its call). “O’er the saltings:” Clontarf was once an island; later became part of “isthmon;” “salting” would constitute in-between state, brackish sea-water. “Mearmerge:” merging with “sweet” – fresh – water, land re-emerging as the tide recedes. 17.24: “Mearmerge two races, swete and brack:” a bit of Aryan phrenological mumbojumbo here, I think. “Brachiocephalic” people were broad-headed and considered congenitally inferior to people (like Mulligan, in “Telemachus”) with long, “equine” heads. Aryans qualified, and of course ("swete") Swedes were the gold standard. Echo of “white and black” goes along with racialist theorizing. 17.26: “requiesce:” “Requiescat in Pace” 17.27-8: “flick as flowflakes:” thick as snowflakes; also, “foam-flakes:” salt-water flakes left in wake of tide 17.28: “waast:” vast 17.29: “whirlworlds:” in Orchestra, by Sir John Davies, Antinous argues that the world is so named because it whirls on its axis. 17.29-30: “isges to isges, erde from erde:” “isges:” Gaelic for water. Again, alternation of water and land in this mutably isthmian setting 17.31: “Stench!:” Christiani suggests this as Danish for “Just think!” 18.1: “’Zmorde!” “Merde!:” Waterloo’s “mot de Cambronne” 18.6: “on all fours:” in accord with; here, able to comprehend 18.6-7: “O’c’stle, n’wc’stle, tr’c’stle, crumbling:” Mink: “The 4 Royal Manors of Co Dub, est[ablished] under Henry II, were Esker, Newcastle, Saggart, and Crumlin.” 18.8: “moulder:” mother – as to one reciting the nursery rhyme “O’c’stle,” etc. 18.18: “rede:” early spelling of “reed,” as writing implement; see “rush” of .28 and McHugh’s note. To read a book, especially this one, is to participate in writing it. 18.19: “world:” compare Ulysses’ mixup of “word” and “world.” 18.20: “Tieckle:” tickle. (Laughing will follow.) 18.21: “Forsin:” For sin: the reason his (Belshazzar’s) kingdom will be given to the Medes and Persians. 18.22: “Porsons:” Richard Porson, distinguished classical scholar; the sense is that what has happened in the past is now in the hands of latter-day archivists. 18.22-3: “oloss and again:” of loss and gain; alas 18.23-4: “our old Heidenburgh in the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth:” Genesis 3:8: “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” Also, perhaps Pope's Essay on Man: "Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind / Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind." 18.32: “turnpaht:” in the first appearance, in the 1927 transition, “turnpaht” was “turnpath.” (Oxford editors do not include.) Makes more sense, I think, although OED has no entry for what it seems to mean here: the turn in the path on which an ox, pulling a plough, reverses directions. 18.34: “Futhorc:” futtock 18.34: “effingee:" FNG. I don’t know what it stands for (long shot: the context is heavily military in its language, and the Urban Dictionary gives “Fucking New Guy” for a new arrival to a military unit; earliest entry is 1972, but that may have more to do with the evolution of obscenity laws than with the word’s actual terminus a quo), but it is “for” a "fing." 18.35: “flintforfall:” funeral 18.35: “O I fay!:” O I say! 18th century “s” 18.36: “Unwap:” Unwrap 19.2: “cued:” cute 19.2: “peas:” p’s: abbreviation for pence: the tommy’s “pecuniar” “pay roll” (.2, 4). Seven p. daily would have been too little by the time of FW: since late in the 19th century British privates had been paid a shilling a day, although deductions could leave them with considerably less. 19.2-4: “peas of quite a pecuniar interest inaslittle as they are the pellets that make the tomtummy’s pay roll:” compare Napoleon: “An army travels on its stomach.” As in “Two Gallants,” “peas” can be what American call beans, a staple of the military diet. 19.3: “inaslittle as:” inasmuch as 19.4-5: “Right rank ragnar rocks and with these rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong:” classic tonguetwister: Around the ragged rock, the rugged rascals ran. (There are variants: “ragged” and “rugged” switching places, for instance.) Google Books’ first entry is from 1921. Chervin (see 15.32 and note) cites it as an example of how English speakers sometimes have trouble pronouncing "r." Probably not coincidental that it appears here just after "Mutt"s problems with stuttering have ceased. Also: language of military maneuver (“Right ranks,” etc.) and aggression: compare 122.6-19, where R (“ars, rrrr!” (122.6)) is, of all the letters of the alphabet, the one spoiling for a fight. 19.5: “orangotangos:” Orang is Malay for man. Later, beginning at 110.25-8, orange peels will feature in excavations of the "mudmound" (111.34) from which FW's letter is unearthed. 19.5: “rightgorong:” right go wrong: appears twice in Ulysses; seems to mean: determined to proceed, regardless of the consequences. 19.6-7: “Thik is for thorn that thuck in its thoil like thumfool’s thraitor thrust for vengeance:” the sequence of “th”s here is of course because that is the sound signified by a thorn. With some latitude, the cursive lower-case thorn – resembling a backward 6 with the tail crossed – can recall the gesture of making figs – clenching a fist and thrusting the thumb (“thumfool’s”) between index and middle finger. (See 9.13 and note.) An obscene and hostile gesture, in keeping with the tenor of the “Right ranks” passage just finished. “Thraitor:” threatening traitor 19.7-8: “mnice old mness it all mnakes:” in translation, Greek “mn” = Latin “m.” 19.9: “alfrids, beatties:” Sir Alfred Chester Beatty bought a collection of newfound New Testament codices; the results were first published in 1933. 19.9-10: “Owlets’ eegs (O stoop to please!):” owlets are baby owls; owls’ eggs are white and, according to pictures found on Google Images, sometimes oval, sometimes round – perhaps like “O” and “oo.” Possible overtone of “owl eyes:” also conspicuously round and good for detecting signs; an owl “stoop"s when it descends on its prey. 19.11: “epsilene:” epicene, obsolete. Also, since (“daltons”) delta was the last letter of the Greek alphabet just mentioned, epsilon 19.11-2: “haudworth a wipe o grass:” compare 304 Fn. 3: “Wipe your glosses with what you know” – where, I will be suggesting, “what you know” is also “you know what,” euphemism for shit. Here, anticipating the Russian General story of II.3: hardly worth an arsewiper. (See 10.08 and 16.35, above, with notes.) 19.15: “Paddy Wippingham:” Dick Whittington, paired with Saint Patrick. The connection here is pest control: Patrick rid Ireland of snakes and Whittington’s cat at least kept London’s rat population down. 19.17-8: “pricker than our whosethere outofman could quick up her whatsthats:” quicker than the notoriously curious Eve could obtain answers to her incessant questions, such as “What’s that?” “Pricker” is surely a clue as to what the what is. See next entry. 19.17-8: “her whatsthats:” In Gargantua and Pantagruel, the vagina is a comment a nom. Goes, obviously, with “pricker.” 19.20: “Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise:” X’s. (Last entry, “axenwise:” X and Y’s.) FW’s letter ends with a string of three or four X’s. 19.20-1: “One by one place one be three dittoh and one before:" the axe (.19) is making Ogham markings, probably on a tree, here being tallied, probably incorrectly, as Roman numerals: one by one plus one is three and one is ("-fore") four. (As usual, alternates occur: “One by one” can be 1 x 1, which would equal not 2 but 1; a sequence of two 1’s, with "place" as short for "decimal place," followed by 3, automatically alerts the FW reader to look out for a 2, which may here be supplied by “dittoh,” since “ditto” can be fairly translated as “duplicate:" 11.32.) In the Irish Ogham alphabet, three “left side/upward” strokes would be a T, i.e. Tristram, signaling Issy – a frequent FW theme. (For a similar scenario, see 571.4-9.) 19.21-2: “two nursus one make a plausible three dittoh and one before:” again, seems to be a "plausible," if scrambled, 1132: the two can be II/11, then three, then ditto as duplicate – two. (“One before?” Before what?) 19.22-3: “three-legged calvers:” yet another reading of the “axenwise” marks, this time as pictograph – and, horizontally positioned, of E, the male principal. 19.23: “ivargraine jadesses:” evergreen (female) jades: coinciding (jade is green) contraries: a “jade” is a woman thought to been hardened by her experience with men. “Ivargraine” probably includes “Graine” (one of a number of spellings) of Dermot and Graine – the Irish Tristan and Iseult. The evergreen echo would seem to go with hypothesis (see .20-1 and note) that the message has been cut on the trunk of a tree. 19.25-6: “What a meanderthalltale to unfurl:” so the book is, for now anyway, a scroll, not a codex. (Some have suggested a Möbius strip.) “Meanderthalltale:” ancient meandering tall tale 19.26: “squatter:” back in the beginning, anyone occupying any spot of land was a de facto squatter. 19.26-7: “and anntisquattor and postproneauntisquattor!:” any antesquatter – someone claiming prior (ante) squatting rights – would be an (anti) enemy. “Postproneauntisquattor,” incorporating Latin for both “behind” and “for,” probably signifies how tangled such claims can get. (Also, Ann/Anna has become an aunt/auntie.) 19.27-8: “tim, nick and larry:” Tom, Dick, and Harry 19.28: “sons of the sod:” an Irish-inflected version of “sons of the soil,” a fairly widespread sentimental epithet for farmers 19.28-9: “sons of the sod, sons, littlesons, yea and lealittlesons:” a generation of locals being progressively distanced from their roots in the “sod.” Not clear to me what “lealittlesons” signifies, but it certainly seems like a yet-one-degree further remove from “littlesons.” “-Little-:” the present race, as opposed to when “there were giants in the earth in those days.” 19.29: “every sue, siss, and sally of us:” perhaps obvious: female version of Tom, Dick, and Harry; call-and-response answer to 19.27-8. 19.29-30: “dugters of Nan!:” dugs of Nan and the daughters who sucked on them; probably owing to the tradition of “Nana” for mother, grandmother, wet nurse, or governess 19.30: “Accusative ahnsire! Damadam to infinities!” an excerpt from some Latin lesson in hell: The correct answer, sir, was in the accusative! I condemn you to write out your answer in infinitives, for infinity! Compare the centurion and graffitist scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian. “Ahnsire...Damadam:” sir and madame, (grand)father and (grand)mother. 19.33-4: “You gave me a boot (signs on it!) and I ate the wind:” You kicked me out (either: curse you! or: as a result) and I went hungry. For “signs on it!” compare “Circe:” “Signs on you, hairy arse:” here, an Irish expression of hostility. (Petr Ŝkrabánek, however, makes a good case for the “as a result” reading.) For “You gave me a boot,” compare “Cyclops” on Bloom’s being fired: “Joe gave him the order of the boot.” Also, 181.32: “got the boot.” Also, in sailing terminology, to eat the wind relative to a rival sailing ship is to position one’s vessel so as to deprive it of the prevailing wind. 19.34: “I quizzed you a quid (with for what?):” “quiz” can mean something like: to feel out, to find out; here, the sense is probably: I was wondering if you would loan me a quid, the answer being: No. The young Joyce had many such exchanges, no doubt sometimes with responses of the “What for?” sort. 20.1: “under the ban of:” under the banner of 20.1: “infrarational:” by analogy to infrared, infradig 20.1: “fore:” given context: before 20.1-3: “milchcamel...has still to moor:” idea of camel being moored is probably licensed by its reputation as “the ship of the desert.” Also, “Moor” as native of North Africa 20.2: “heartvein:” heart vein, a.k.a. great cardiac vein. Tradition has it extending to the fourth finger of the left hand – hence the ring finger; here, it goes to the space between Mohammed’s eyes. 20.2: “eyebrowns:” Joyce’s source describes Mohammed’s eyes as black, not brown, so probably this means brown eyebrows. 20.3: “date:” OED has 1885 as the earliest instance of “date” as meaning an appointment with romantic possibilities. 20.4: “palm that’s hers:” her (“cousin charmian”’s (.3)) hand. Also, palm tree; a date tree is a palm tree. 20.5-7: “A bone, a pebble, a ramskin,; chip them, chap them, cut them up allways; leave them to terracook in the muttheringpot: and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter:” to quote from Wikipedia, Cro-Magnons “used bones, shells, and teeth to make jewelry;” they also produced cave paintings; Joyce’s youth coincided with many discoveries of Cro-Magnon art and ornament. 20.7: "muttheringpot:" A note in Joyce's Notebook VI.B.15: "motherpot." The source identifies it as the "Mother-Pot," symbol of womb or vagina, of Hathor, Egyptian goddess. 20.8-9: “rubrickredd out:” brick red; red hot, i.e. brand new. Also, “rubrics” were red letters in illuminated manuscripts, and later, highlighted liturgical instructions, sometimes considered of divine origin. Also, Roman civil laws, written in vermilion, were called rubrics. 20.9-10: “alcohoran:” alchemy. Also, the Koran prohibits alcohol. 20.10: “(the rapt one warns):” Mohammed, receiving the words of the Koran while in a state of rapture 20.10: “papyr:” papyrus 20.14: “bound over:” apprentices being indentured were said to be bound over. Also, given context, binding a book 20.19: “Nondum:” London. “How many miles to London:” an English version of “How many miles to Babylon,” with the same answer: seventy. Almost certainly related to the Bible’s allotment of “three score and ten years” to a human life. 20.19-20: “sytty maids per man:” a Mohammedan hadith (not, be it noted, the Koran itself) promises seventy-two virgins to each martyr in the faith. 20.21: “handself:” own self 20.23-5: “every busy eerie whig's a bit of a torytale to tell. One's upon a thyme and two's behind their lettice leap and three's among the strubbely beds:" earwigs are garden pests; in the next chapter we will meet someone in the business of catching and killing them. Here they are scrambling around in the greenery. 20.25: “the chicks picked their teeths:” compare expression “rare as hens’ teeth” 20.27: "cuddy:" Brewer: "Cuddy, an abbreviation of Cuthbert, is the North Country and Scottish familiar name for a donkey." 20.28: “folty barnets:” children; also, according to Padraic Colum and Samuel Beckett, a payback swipe at Rebecca West 20.28: “For then was the age when hoops ran high:” as hoop skirts being raised: a state of affairs conducive to multiple pregnancies – ("folty barnets") forty bairns, for instance 20.29: “a pomme full grave:” a heavy apple, brought down by gravity: surely both Newton’s (gravity – counterpointed with “levity” of .30) and Adam’s (“grave:” according to Milton, it “brought death into the world, and all our woe”) 20.30: “gelding:” gilding 20.32: “prytty pyrrhique:” Issy frequently signals with pyrrhics. Compare next entry. 20.32: “perruque:” French for head of hair, wig. Also, again, “pyrrhic:” Issy and her lover often converse, metrically, through pyrrhic and spondee, respectively. 20.33: “trippiery:” as in tripping the light fantastic: dancing. As a general observation: it’s probably not accidental that this Miltonic tag crops up four lines after the echo of another one. No particular logic, perhaps, but It’s the kind of thing that happens in FW all the time. Also, possible overtone of Tipperary, which it’s a long way to. 21.2: “Lissom! lissom:” lissome: something a dancer should be 21.3: “larpnotes:” lark/harp notes 21.8: “ribberrobber:” in coming into existence, Eve robbed Adam of a rib. 21.8-9: “everybuddy to his lovesaking eyes:” that is, to his loving eyes, she was his all in all. Oxford editors insert "else" after "everybuddy." 21.10: “Jarl van Hoother:” initials J. V. H. may suggest J H V H, the Hebrew tetragrammaton for God. See next entry. 21.10: “burnt head:” the phrase occurs in Leviticus, in instructions for a burnt offering. 21.10: “lamphouse:” given the Howth setting, this is presumably Bailey Lighthouse. 21.11: “laying cold hands on himself:” to lay hands on someone is to apprehend them, often to arrest them. 21.12: “dummy:” many theories of the identity; I would suggest that, among other things, he/it is the shadowy “tertium quid” generated between the twins. See note to 10.6, above. If, as I hereby suggest, the Grimm Brothers’ story “Our Lady’s Child” is a major component, then that story’s central figure’s refusal either to speak or to speak the truth – to remain dumb – echoes the Jarl’s refusal to answer the prankquean’s riddling questions. (“Our Lady’s Child:” see William Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP), 2002, pp. 316-27.) The major divergence, I think, is that in the Grimms’ story the (non)answerer at the door is a man, not a woman. Also, and as always, again, among other things, that at 23.5 he/it is ordered to shut up shop and put the shutters up argues for some connection to Sackerson, the Mullingar’s manservant and, as “Watsy Lyke” (245.33), my candidate for FW’s least determinable principal. 21.13: "earthenhouse:" earth-houses; hidden below-ground-level homes of early Irish residents 21.14: "dermot:" Dermot, as in the Dermot and Graine (again, one of many possible spellings) story; one version of Grace O’Malley’s first name is Graine. 21.15: “prankquean:” “Quean” is a classic FW equal-opposite. It can, as McHugh says, be a disreputable woman – hussy, slut, even whore. And, of course, it sounds like “queen.” Thus Byron, in Don Juan, calls the notoriously promiscuous Catherine the Great a “Queen of Queans.” In Scots dialect, a “quean,” according to the OED, is “a young woman…with a youthful bloom…Also, a daughter.” In “The Answer,” Robert Burns has fond memories of a “sonsy quean,” “sonsy,” meaning pleasant, attractive. 21.16-7: "And she lit up and fireland was ablaze:" compare 22.3-4, 22.27-8. Joyce on his daughter Lucia: "Whatever spark of gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and has kindled a fire in her brain." On one occasion Lucia started a fire in her room because, she said, fire was red and her father had a red face. 21.18-9, etc.: “poss of porterpease,” etc: Joyce Notebook VI.B.17.088: an excerpt from Arthur Chervin, Bégaiement et autre maladies fonctionelles de la parole, about the biblical "shibboleth:" "Cette histoire rappelle assez celle des Vêpres sicilliennes avec le mot - « de touche » - ciceriques que les Français ne pouvaient articuler convenablement tchitchéri." The “peas” of the “prankquean” sequence constitute a shibboleth. During the ("Vêpres sicilliennes") Sicilian Vespers of 1266, French occupants and occupiers who were unable to successfully pronounce “ciciri” (Sicilian dialect for “chickpea”) were slaughtered. (The acceptable pronunciation was “che-cha-re;” “sis-sa-re” was wrong.) See second note to .20, also 354.14-15 and 425.19. In a related identification scene, the prankquean is hinting that she is the Jarl’s daughter – that they are both named “Porter.” That is why they look as like one another as two peas in a pod; to her repeated question of Why do I look like a Porter?, the suppressed incest-implying answer should be, Because you are one, because you are my daughter. See next entry. 21.20: ”her grace in dootch nossow:” in British protocol, “her grace” is the proper term for a duchess – hence, probably, the succeeding “dootch.” In Scandinavian protocol, a “Jarl” (.10) was second in rank only to the king – that is, the equivalent of a duke. Which is to say, the possibility of some close relationship between Jarl and prankquean, either of marriage or (since dukeships are inherited) consanguinity, is being raised. 21.20: “Shut!:” Shut up! The Jarl does not want to answer, or even hear, her question. Also, as McHugh notes, “Shit!,” as such an answer of the prankquean’s, and infancy’s, eternal number one (.15) with a number two. Also, in the case of both “shibboleth” and “ciceri,” the enunciation of the sh/ch sound (see note to .18-9, above) would have been critical, literally a matter of life and death. Also, both recalls Waterloo’s “mot de Cambronne” and anticipates the Russian General, shitting on Irish turf. 21.20-1: “grace o’ malice:” grace coming out of evil: a version of Augustine’s “Felix Culpa!,” one of FW’s key phrases. If, as I suggest, “Our Lady’s Child” (see notes to .12, 22) is a significant source, it may be pertinent that the Virgin Mary is often commemorated as a Second Eve, her grace redeeming the sin of the first. 21.21-2: “shandy westerness:” "shanty Irish" were poor, lower-class Irish, and a disproportionate number of them were in the west. Also, O Hehir has seanda, Gaelic for antique. 21.22: “rain, rain, rain:” in “Our Lady’s Child,” the Virgin Mary saves the life of the main female character by raining on and dousing the flames of the site where the latter was about to be burned as a witch. 21.23-4: “Stop deef stop come back to my earin:” Telegraphese: “stop” signaled the end of a sentence. As elsewhere in FW, especially in II.3, radio and telegraph signals – both, for a while, equally “wireless” – are combined: one of Ireland’s two radio stations, 2RN, took its signature from the words of the song “Come Back to Ireland” (i.e. to Erin). 21.24: “my earin:” as “my hearing,” goes with “deef,” an occasional pronunciation of “deaf.” Given radio presence, also means something like, Come back within broadcast range. 21.26-7: “forty years’ walk:” given prevalence of rain, surely referring to the forty days and forty nights of Noah’s flood 21.27: “blessings:” as elsewhere in FW, includes French "blessé," wounded 21.27: “lovespots:” Dermot’s lovespots attracted Graine to him; washing them off would presumably make him less sexy, perhaps less sexed as well. 21.27: “Tourlemonde:” “tous le monde:” everybody; “tours le monde:” around the world. Also, Mink persuasively relates the prankquean’s excursions to the tenth century text of The Voyage of Bran, in which Bran and his followers linger on the enchanted isle of Tír na mBan, the Island of Women, where, as Mink points out, since a normal human century equals a year, the prankquean’s standard duration of forty years would be twenty-one weeks. See also .22.08, 22.14, 496.08. 21.29: “owlers masters:” Old Masters 21.29: “tauch:” touch as well as teach. Hence (.29) tickles. Also, according to Brewer, “towcher” means index finger. 21.29: “tickles…luderman:” Lutheranism is not especially noted for jollity, but here being tickled seems to teach the jinny how to be ludically at play. 21.31: “redtom:” Dermot turned upside down. Approximately the same thing will happen to Tristan at 388.3. 21.33: “in her pinafrond, lace at night:” if “her” refers to the jiminy, in a lace pinafore, it may recall the young Joyce’s theory that Oscar Wilde had been made effeminate by being dressed in girls’ clothes as a baby. Also, “lace” (Irish) counterpoints shanty (Irish) of 21.21. 21.35: “cellarmalt:” malt cellar: used for making malt liquors from barley, as well as storing them. Appropriate property now that the Jarl is a host of an inn, “shaking warm hands” 22.2: “brodar and histher:” the first is definitely the brother; the second suggests not just sister but something in an androgynous his/her range. See note to 21.33. 22.3-4: “lit up again and redcocks flew flickering:” traditional Scottish belief that a red cock’s crowing in the barnyard will be followed by a fire. the prankquean is an incendiary presence. 22.5: “wicked:” a reminder that the "wicker"/wicket in "Earwicker" is a door. 22.6-7: “her madesty:” her majesty: a step up from “her grace;” see 21.10 and note. Perhaps pertinent that Grace O’Malley made a famous visit to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I 22.7: “a forethought:” as said (or thought) before 22.8: “Woeman’s Land:” 1. tradition that woman was named thus because, as Eve, she brought woe to man. 2. See note to 21.27. 22.9: “bleethered:” blithered, blathered, bleated (compare 70.19): the wind making the sound of (.10) a “loud finegale,” gale. 22.10: “Stop…stop:” see note to 21.23-4. 22.12: “that laurency night of starshootings:” the annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak on the night of St. Laurence’s/Lawrence's Day, August 10; here, anticipated by “falling angles"/angels of 21.25. Date of the Battle of the Bridge of Ivora - see note to 3.6, also 519.5 and note. 22.14: “punched the curses of cromcruwell:” crewel embroidery is done with a needle. (And, of course, Cromwell was cruel to the Irish.) 22.14-1: “punched the curses of cromcruwell with the nail of a top:” having washed away the wounds – “blessings” (21.27) - she now re-inflicts them. 22.15-6: “four larksical monitrix:" compare “four owlers masters” (21.29): larky (happy, lighthearted) and owlish (brooding, deep) connote oppositely; “monitrix” may indicate that in this case the four are (as sometimes they will be later, e.g. 386.15) female. 22.16: “touch him his tears:” compare “Toucheaterre” (19.14) which Mink lists as Angleterre: England. 22.17: “onecertain:” counterpointing: one certain (faith); uncertain 22.17: “tristian:” triste, sorrowful, as opposed to playful “luderman” (21.29). As before, he seems to have learned the opposite of what his teachers were teaching. 22.21: “nice lace:” see note to 21.23. 22.24: “Toughertrees:” compare “Toucheaterre” (19.14). Also, compare 202.30: “tough as the oaktrees.” 22.27: “lit out:” ran away 22.30: “skirtmishes:” skirmishes 22.32: “terror of dames:” in “Circe,” Bloom is briefly a “squire of dames:” a lady’s man, named after the woman-besotted character in Book III of Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Here, probably means “lady-killer” in both literal and figurative senses. 23.1-2: “rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman:” rude yelling Orangeman; “gruebleen” may be variant on “true blue,” as in “Nestor:” the black north and the true blue bible,” here blending with Ireland’s green. Hard-line Ulster Protestants were “true blue;” Joyce’s work (Portrait, chapter five; “Counterparts;” “Nestor,” and, especially, FW III.3) typically depicts Ulstermen as noisy and overbearing. 23.2: “violet:” violent 23.2-3: “To the whole longth of the strength of his bowman’s bill:” in context, a bill is a Medieval/Renaissance weapon: various types, but perhaps most commonly a shaft with a blade attached, like a halberd; “bowman” is of course, like a “billman,” an armed soldier. Compare 198.30: “neither bowman nor shot abroad.” A bowshot is the distance an arrow can be shot. 23.4-5: “he ordurd and his thick spch spck for her to shut up shop:” as in 21.20, only in reverse order; he shits – makes ordure – while simultaneously having the door shut. Also, again: he tells her to shut up. 23.5: “And the duppy shot the shutter clup:” again, this is the job of the manservant, Sackerson. “Duppy” probably echoes “dopey,” which Sackerson is sometimes accused of being or shown to be. 23.9: “under shurts:” undershorts, for instance lady’s underwear 23.9: “peace:” as opposed to “pease,” which started all the trouble 23.11: “sweet unclose:” female sexual response. (Obvious?) 23.11: “Narwhealian:” a narwhal is a northern whale with a unicorn-like horn; suggestively if not blatantly phallic, it would seem to go, as counterpart, with “sweet unclose” (.11). 23.12-3: “The prankquean was to hold her dummyship and the jimminies was to keep the peacewave:” as Porter, this porter is a door-keeper, a “janitor” (27.2) like Janus. (Kate, another door-keeper, is a “janitrix” (8.8).) The doors of Janus’ Roman temple were opened during times of war, shut for peace. The Jarl has just shut the door for the third time. (On the other hand, according to the legend, the St. Lawrence family of Howth promised Grace O’Malley that they would keep their door open for dinner guests.) 23.14: “git the wind up:” to get the wind up is to be alarmed. 23.20: “Undy gentians:” indigestion, with the word interrupted by the thing itself. The same thing happens in "Lestrygonians:" Bloom's "Indiges." 23.16-24.2: “O…convaynience:” much of this paragraph plays off the conceit of HCE being a land prominence (specifically, Howth) and ALP a river (specifically, the Liffey.): e.g., “Hill, rill” (.17). Google Books tosses up exactly one instance of what it says is an Irish-Scottish Gaelic expression, “as deaf as the hills.” A slender reed, but regardless: the hill here is certainly the listening (deafly) one, and the river is the talking (loudening) one. 23.17-8: “Breast high and bestride!” one could (barely) wade a river if the water were no more than breast-high. 23.21: “Wolkencap is on him:” compare Yeats’s words from “The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland:” “vapour-turbaned steep.” I have seen such sights in the west of Ireland: hills with clouds overlaying the peaks, like vaporous headwear. Pertinent here that clouds are water moisture, evaporated from, for instance, rivers 23.21-2: “audiurient, he would evesdrip:” if he could hear better, he would eavesdrop on the sound, which would be that of water dripping from eaves. Joyce’s notes say that the hearer is deaf or going deaf. 23.22-3: “were it mous at hand, were it dinn of bottles in the far ear:” Joyce’s commentary, that “mous” is a “Chaucerian form to suggest distance in time,” seems to raise more questions than it answers. In any case, the common expression “quiet as a mouse” is surely pertinent: the listener has trouble hearing, whether of something nearby and quiet, a mouse, or noisy and distant, the clashing sounds of bottles (for the innkeeper: Joyce’s comment says “vintner,” which according to the OED can be “an innkeeper selling wine”) or battles, perhaps distant in time (the farther away, the longer it takes for the sound to arrive) as well as/instead of space. “Far ear” may mean the ear farthest from the noise – an important difference if one remembers that this is Howth, the head of a buried giant; in that case, “mouse at hand” is at the near ear, the bottles/battles coming in the far ear, and one of the points being made is that they are equally faint because of the difference in distance: a pebble dropping next to you may be as loud as a bomb going off on the other side of town. The mutable relativism of perception, especially when it comes to inner conditions interacting with outer sensations, was I believe, at the forefront of the Joyce agenda since at least the first page of Portrait. 23.23-4: “With lipth she lithpeth to him all the time of thuch on thuch and thow on thow:” with lips she lispeth to him (pronounced lispily) all the time of (that is, about) such and such and so and so (also pronounced lispily). “Lips she lispeth” may be a deliberate tongue-twister. Conventionally, lisping suggests infancy, affectation, or seduction. 23.24-5: “She he she ho she ha to la:” what she is lisping, either mispronounced or misheard or both. Echo of so-fa-la-ti-do 23.25-7: “Impalpabunt, he abhears. The soundwaves are his buffeteers; they trompe him with their trompes:” generalization: in FW (also “Sirens”), ears are eardrums, and eardrums are drums. Here, sound reaching the ear equals air molecules beating on (ear)drums, something felt (the “-palp-” in “Impalpabunt,” “buffeteers” (buffeters), “trompe” (tramp, tromp) as well as heard. See 224.19 and note, also next entry.) 23.27-9: “roary and the wave of hooshed and the wave of hawhawhawrd and the wave of never(etc.):" sounds of waves on ocean shore: crashing wave (roar); silence after (hushed); rattling of pebbles and surf being drawn back: compare Arnold’s “Dover Beach:" Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow... then cacophonous white noise before next crash. As attested in his poem “Thou Leanest to the Shell of Night,” as well as “Sirens” in Ulysses, Joyce was acutely conscious that the ear, echoed back, generates its own sound, the oceanic roar that is really the coursing of the blood in the inner ear, which also has its (pulsing) rhythms. Here, trying hard to hear, the listener is, to at least some extent, hearing himself. 23.29-20: “Landloughed by his neaghboormistress:” the Sutton Peninsula of which Howth is a part could be cut off from the mainland if the water rose high enough; “landlocked” usually means without access to the oceans, but here it means without access to the rest of the land. 23.30: ”perpetrified:” both perpetuated and petrified by his “offsprung,” his children. 23.31: “moaning pipers:” pipes played at a funeral 23.31: “the louthly one: as in ME tag “the loathly lady,” here combining overtone of “love;” compare 627.17, 627.18. 23.32: “loab:” again, love 23.32: “devorers:" "devotés," devourers - together, sometimes the price of fame 23.33: “her pudor puff:” her powder puff: a sign of gussying up (in the powder room, for instance), therefore of female vanity and flirtatiousness. Compare “Circe:” “Woman, with sweet pudor undoing her belt of rushrope.” Shameful modesty, proverbially typical of pubescent youth 23.33: “lipalip: these and other double i’s in the vicinity indicate Issy's presence as well as ALP's. 23.34: “biff:” but 23.34: “our breed and washer givers:” our bread and water givers 23.35-6: “vestal flouting in the dock:” either the vessel floating into dock or the vestal (prostitute) flouting decency in the court dock (or around the docks, proverbial hangout for prostitutes). 23.36: “plein avowels:” plain avowals 24.1: “nor a’ toole o’ tall o’toll:” has just said that without their influence there would have been no “holy spier on the town” (23.35); now adds that there would be no St. Lawrence O’Toole Church, with its bells’ tooling-talling-tolling. At 601.28 St. Lawrence will be one of the Dublin churches joining in the “clangalied” of bell-ringings. By design or not, in FW, Chapelizod's St. Laurence's church can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from Dublin's St. Lawrence's church. 24.2: “noddy hint to the convaynience:” not a hint of a convenience. Irish, perhaps stage-Irish pronunciation of “convenience,” euphemism for a public toilet. The word in this sense will recur several times, sometimes (214.3, 421.3, 520.6, 524.1) referring to a public toilet that is inconveniently out of order. 24.5: “urned his dread:” put the ashes of his dead in urns. 79.17-8 says that earwigs carry their dead to the “earthball,” which I take as referring to burial in the earth as well as the ball-rolling of dung beetles. 24.5: “dragon volant:” flying dragon. (Obvious?) Common figure in coats of arms. Perhaps suggested because earwigs have wings. 24.6: “delivered us to boll weevils, amain:” from the Lord’s Prayer: “deliver us from evil…Amen” 24.7: “Unfru-Chikda-Uru-Wukru:” even Brendan O Hehir has no idea what language is being imitated or mocked here, but does suggest that “Unfru” derives from Teutonic Hunfrith, “Hun-peace.” As a version of “Earwicker,” anticipating the next chapter, may mean either earwig or earwigger – the latter a gardener set on exterminating earwigs as pests. Typical FW flip-flop: is he a champion member of the species (and related types, like boll weevils) or their deadly enemy? 24.7: mighty liberator…ancestor most worshipful:” Daniel O’Connell, “the Liberator:” the Joyce family was distantly related. 24.9: “blushmantle:” “mantled with blushes;” blushes “mantling to his/her forehead:” a number of fairly common poeticisms along this line 24.11: “fiery bird disembers:” Jesus as a type of phoenix rising from the embers, thereby being dis-embered; born in December. See next entry. 24.13: “whines for my wedding:” possible allusion to wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine 24.14: “whines for my wedding…bride and bedding:” match-makings and mock-weddings were common at some Irish wakes. 24.14: “is a? Wake?:” Is he awake? (The answer follows.) 24.16: “Now be aisy, good Mr. Finnimore, sir:” more Irish (or stage-Irish) idiom; with some variations, it will continue to the end of the chapter. 24.18: “Healiopolis:” Joyce loathed Tim Healy, whom he considered Parnell’s Judas. (Hugh Kenner points this out.) Healy was Governor-General of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. His home was in Chapelizod. 24.19: “Kapelavaster:” O Hehir: Gaelic for his master’s horse 24.19: “after the calvary:” all in all, it is probably remarkable that FW contains only one mixup of “cavalry” and “Calvary.” (Later: Your annotator thought this was so at the time. As remarked in the note to 564.19-25, have since had second thoughts. Note to self: avoid categorical statements, and never say never.) Given “Healiopolis” of the previous line, the Calvary was Parnell’s, its traces since trodden out by the armed and mounted agents of the state. Since Finnegan’s death, the tuft-hunting bullyboys, with Healy as their head, have taken over and proceeded to stamp out anything worth remembering; why, therefore, Mr. Finnegan, would you wish to come back? Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French gives an impressive account of the difference, in battle, between being a foot soldier and being a cavalryman. In any one-to-one matchup the latter is going to win, and that is that. 24.26: “to leave the clean tanglesome one lushier than its neighbour.:” that is, in Ireland each field is lusher than the one before: the grass is always greener 24.31: "keld water:" Old Norse: "kelda" is well or spring 24.33: "the whole treasure of the pyre:" Joyce's Notebook VI.B.145.35 note "treasure pyre" comes from a book about Viking lore and customs. The "pyre" here is for a Viking funeral, including "pouch, gloves, flasks" etc. (.32) to be burned with the body. 24.34: “pole ole Lonan:” Poor Old Woman: personification of Ireland 25.4: “Madison man:” perhaps (dating is uncertain) Madison Avenue (advertising) man. Context tends to confirm – “Basilico’s ointment” (.9), for instance 25.5: “Poppypap’s a passport out:” Possets soaked with laudanum were administered, sometimes lethally, to babies. Here, the same seems recommended for eliminating unwanted codgers (or resurrected corpses). Throughout the 19th century and on into the 20th, opium in some form (in this case, it seems, mixed with honey) was often the drug of choice for euthanasia. 25.5: “taught to gooden you:” the opium at least ought to make you feel good, as Doctor Faherty said it would. 25.6: “comb:” as in honeycomb 25.6-7: “the food for glory:” compare the evangelist Dowie, who in “Circe” brags he has “yanked” sinners “to glory” in heaven. Nectar (.7) is of course the drink of the glorious gods. 25.7: “pot:” as in honey pot. See next entry. 25.8: “goat’s milk:” thus adding up to milk and honey 25.9: “Your fame is spreading like Basilico’s ointment:” see note to .4. Although Google Books shows no such brand name at the time, Basilicon ointment (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) was a popular home remedy in the late 19th century, and the wording here (especially “Basilico’s,” not “Balisilicon” or “Basilico”) suggests, I think, that it is being promoted and publicized as a patent medicine. (The sentence truncates the full meaning: your fame is spreading, just like the popularity of Basilico’s ointment.) Perhaps pertinent that one of its ingredients was bees’ wax - see previous two entries, entry for .6. 25.9-10: “the Fintan Lalors piped you overborder:” neither of the two main likely senses of "overborder" is encouraging: either being put overboard - walking the plank - or serenaded on your way to exile over the border, to Ulster, presumably, by a band which from its inception was associated with nationalist causes. 25.11: “they calling names after you:” a typical FW innuendo: they’re calling you names. 25.13-4: “every hollow holds a hallow:” every (Irish) hollow is hallowed. Possible Burns echo (“if a body meet a body”) would go with overall mood of sentimental nostalgia – next entry, for instance 25.14: “pledge to the drengs:” drink to the dregs. Also, since dreng is Norwegian for warrior, drinking a toast to the troops: Wellington famously said his troops were "scum." 25.15-6: “And admiring to our supershillelagh where the palmsweat on high is the mark of your manument:” perhaps obvious: a “supershillelagh” would be an enormously tall shillelagh – maybe in fact a tree – and they are amazed by how high up its length is the sweat-mark left by the hand of the giant who held it. The whole thing is a monument to his manliness. 25.18: “bowed and soild:” besides bought and sold (McHugh), bowed down and soiled, the fate of Saint Patrick, who was sold into slavery 25.18-9: “letdown itself from the oner of the load:” let down by God Himself, the One God, the owner of the lot 25.19-20: “it was that paddyplanters might pack up plenty:” heavily ironized (by Joyce anyway) Panglossianism: hey! faults on both sides and all that, but the betrayal and suffering experienced by - unfortunately, Patrick - you, did after all make it possible for rich Ascendancy planters to get richer! (“It was that” in sense of “It was so that.”) 25.20: “laps:” lapses 25.21: “to free:” Christiani (with a question mark) suggests Fri” to woo. Would seem to fit the context: the old man is being remembered for his ways as a “planter” with goddesses and lasses; compare Molly Bloom on Edward VII: “he might have planted me.” Although, as McHugh says, “G.O.G.” (.23) clearly refers to Gladstone, much of the language here sounds more fitting for Daniel O’Connell. 25.21: “to free was easy:” expression: free and easy 25.27-8: “Great Erinnes and Brettland:” imagined reversal of power relationship between Great Britain and Ireland: Great (or Greater: “[Great...Er])” Erin, and Britt-land. 25.29: “bung king:” slang for publican. Occurs in Henry IV, Part Two. 25.30: “That you could fell an elmstree twelve urchins couldn’t ring round:” here, the reference is surely to Gladstone: he publicly chopped down trees as proof of his vigor in old age – in this case, an elm whose trunk was so wide that twelve children, holding hands, couldn’t circle it. Echo of “Ring around the Rosie” 25.31: “hoist high the stone:” hurling the stone: ancient version of shot-putting; in “Cyclops,” considered a traditional Irish sport 25.34: “taken waters:” I don’t get it, but this pretty clearly echoes “taking the waters,” as practiced at spas by the upper-crusters of Joyce’s day. 25.35: “to lay the cable:” presumably the Atlantic Cable, enabling telegraphic communication between Britain and America. Considered here as the work of one heroic figure, a Herculean feat 25.35-6: “who was the batter could better Your Grace:” to top it off, he was a better batter than W.G. Grace, legendary cricketer. 25.36-26.1: “Mic Mac Magnus MacCawley can take you off to the pure perfection and Leatherbags Reynolds tries your shuffle and cut:” the former can imitate your mannerisms perfectly; the second is still trying to equal your devious ways – either your mastery of card-sharping or of trickery in general. 26.3: “eggynaggy and a kis to tilly up:” “Kis” as in “kish,” basket (of eggs); “tilly,” in context of eggs in “eggynaggy,” would be thirteen, instead of the prescribed dozen. Joyce entitled a collection of his poems Twelve and a Tilly. 26.4: “Buggaloffs since he went Jerusalemfaring in Arssia Manor:” “Buggaloffs” (buggers off) goes, obviously, with “Arssia Manor,” especially since Bulgaria, etymological origin of “bugger,” is in Asia Minor/Major. Conventionally, at least until late-Medieval times, a general going to Jerusalem would have been a Crusader. Although Glasheen doesn’t list it, I hear an overtone of General Bobrikoff, the Russian General in charge of the occupation of Finland, whose June 16, 1904 assassination is mentioned in “Aeolus.” As such, probably another forerunner of Russian general assassinated in II.3 26.5: “gamier cock:” perhaps obvious, given context: “cock:” penis 26.6: “geese stubbled for All Angels’ Day:” stubble goose: goose fed on stubble; traditional meal on Michaelmas (September 29), a.k.a. Feast of Michael and All Angels 26.7: “scalding tayboil:” scalding table: a raised platform on which a just-killed pig’s carcass is placed to be soaked in boiling water. Likely version of boiling tea (tay): compare 115.4, 455.36, 456.1. 26.8: “Liffey that’s in Heaven!:” Our Father who art in Heaven 26.9: “Hep, hep, hurrah there!:” Hip, hip, hooray! 26.9-10: “Seven times thereto we salute you:” I suggest that the “three” nested in “thereto,” times seven, equals the traditional twenty-one gun salute. Also, given Roman context, a gladiator's "We who are about to die salute you." 26.10: “bag of kits:” kit bag: military knapsack; usage common in WW I 26.10: “falconplumes and jackboots:” a variant of FW’s cap-a-pie motif: from the plume on the helmet on the head to the boots on the feet. Google Books shows numerous occurrences of falcon plumes, almost always as warrior’s ornaments. 26.11-2: “Your heart is in the system of the Shewolf:” long shot: I suggest that the “Shewolf” is Luperca, nurse of Romulus and Remus, that the “system” is therefore Rome or the Roman Empire (also, taking “heart” literally, the circulatory system). Also, as noted in “Aeolus,” Daniel O’Connell’s heart is buried in Rome. That was because he was Catholic. Joyce was raised Catholic, and in some ways, despite everything, his heart remained in that Roman "system." 26.12-3: “Copricapron…cloister of Virgo:” Capricorn and Virgo: constellations, zodiacal houses; the virgin Virgo’s house is, appropriately, a cloister. 26.15: “swell:” Americanism for: very good. (Occurs once in Huckleberry Finn) 26.15-6: “The loamsome roam to Lafayette is ended:” given context, something like: The (your) long road of life is at its end. “Loamsome:” lonesome; loamy (as for a literal road); “Lafayette:” overtone of Liffey. Also, with American idioms in play, a doughboy's WW I "Lafayette, we are here." 26.17: “headboddylwatcher:” as in: watching, or watching over, the dead (the body); “watch” occurs in this sense in Huckleberry Finn. 26.18: “metherjar:” Anglo-Irish “mether: wooden drinking vessel; occurs in this sense in “Cyclops.” Also, “jar” is slang for a pint of stout. 26.19-20: “abramanation:” “Abram man:” a beggar who feigns madness 26.26: “holmsted:” Danish holm sted: island place 26.27: “The horn for breakfast:” a croissant 26.27-8: “The horn for breakfast, one o’gong for lunch and dinnerchime:” different signals – horn, gong, chime – announcing breakfast, lunch, dinner; lunch is at one p.m. 26.29-30: : “the same slop show in the window:” that is, the shop’s display window. See note to 78.12-3. The Mullingar House was also a kind of general store, selling merchandise as well as liquor. 26.32: “Coal’s short but we’ve plenty of bog in the yard:” that is, we’re almost out of coal but can still make a fire with the peat cut out of the bog. 26.35: “spelling beesknees:” spelling bee(s); also, ironically, probably a misspelling of “business” 26.35-6: “tables by mudapplication:” Egyptian tablets were made from mud. (In the lessons chapter (II.2), the geometry lesson begins with a “mugfull of mud” (286.31).) 26.36-27.1: “never pegging smashers after Tom Bowe Glassarse:” they keep to their studies instead of getting into trouble by, for instance, throwing rocks at windows and/or other children. (In fact there will be a rock-throwing, window-smashing incident, in which the boys are involved, at the end of the next chapter.) “Glassarse” is probably by analogy to a boxer’s “glass jaw.” 27.1: “Timmy the Tosser:” that is, of rocks 27.2-3: “doublejoynted janitor:” doubly-joyed (pro)genitor, because of the birth of two sons. (Joyce's Notebook VI.B.145: "great joy - twins.") Also, “janitor” = Janus = door-keeper = porter = Porter, the family’s father 27.4-5: “when the ritehand seizes what the lovearm knows:” probably allusion to Claddagh ring: two hands coming together. Often associated with the twins. One tradition has a Joyce as the initator. 27.7: “postman’s knock:” adolescent kissing game 27.7: “the diggings:” the digs: the premises 27.7: “if the seep were milk:” Koranic verse: “If the sea were ink [for writing] the words of my Lord, the sea would be exhausted before the words of My Lord were exhausted.” Perhaps the basis of the Irish air to which, as McHugh notes, Moore set his poem “Lay His Sword by His Side.” 27.8: “lieve his olde:” leave Isolde 27.9: “tarandtan:” Black and Tan. (Tar is black.) 27.9: “plaidboy:” playboy. Also, as in “Circe,” plaid signifies Scotland: goes with “tartan” in “tarandtan.” Then as now, a “playboy” was an irresponsible, sexually promiscuous young man. 27.10: “making encostive inkum out of the last of his lavings:” some household recipes for ink included human urine. (This seems to pick up from “if the seep were milk” (.7): urine seeping through the child’s diapers or pants.) Also, “lavings:” the last leavings of the wash: bathwater 27.10-1: “writing a blue streak:” expression: to talk a blue streak, that is, endlessly. Perhaps also forecasting the blueness – indecency – of Joyce’s “Blue Book of Eccles” (179.27), Ulysses. FW, with its doubling-back last page, would qualify in a different way. 27.13: “tourch of ivy:” touch of ivy – green – added to the white and gold (liturgical colors for Christmas). Also, ivy as evergreen emblem of Christmas (“Holly” and “Merry,” as in “Merry Christmas,” will follow at .15.) – “Felix Day” (.13): Christ as resurrected phoenix (see 24.11 and note, above) and as redeemer of Augustine’s “felix culpa.” 27.14: “Essie Shanahan has let down her skirts:” in several novels found on Google Books, a girl “lets down her skirts” (and, sometimes, “puts up her hair”) on entering adulthood. The male equivalent would be long pants. 27.18: “poster those pouters:” stick up posters of those (pouting) lips of hers 27.19: “rep:” reputation, probably with innuendo of “demirep:” woman of questionable chastity 27.19: “Lanner’s:” Katti Lanner died in 1908. Given FW’s probable time frame, it’s unlikely that the woman here is supposed to have danced with her or her company. Wikipedia reports that Lanner, though a classical ballerina, had to make concessions to music hall tastes when she moved to London; some of the titles of her late-century shows (“Round the Town,” “On Brighton Pier”) certainly sound oriented toward popular taste; so does the glimpse we get here of the performance. In “Circe,” the dancing master Maginni instructs a student in “The Katti Lanner steps.” 27.24-5: “It’s our warm spirits, boys, he’s spooring. Dimitrius O’Flagonan, cork that cure for the Clancartys!:” in a scenario based on the song “Finnegan’s Wake,” smelling the whiskey (spirits) - on their breaths, from their containers - is rousing him back to life: the last thing anyone wants. So one of the party is ordered to cork up his bottle. 27.26: “to float the Pomeroy:” I can’t find one listed, but “the Pomeroy” here is pretty clearly a ship: he’s drunk enough whiskey to float one. 27.28: “lumbos. Where misties swaddlum:” compare 602.28: “misty Londan” (London), a common expression until the 1960s. The mist is swaddling/swallowing up the scene. 27.31: “I've an eye on queer Behand and old Kate and the butter:” servants were sometimes suspected of stealing and selling items from the larder, for instance butter. An example from Great Expectations: “`Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!'” 27.32: “her war souvenir postcards:” compare Kate as post-battle profiteer, 8.8-10.23. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair describes hucksters selling battle souvenirs to families of soldiers killed at Waterloo. 27.33-4: “Assure a sure:” As sure as sure 27.36: “shed your remnants:” given context, "remnants" is a joke word for "raiments," with a queasy overtone of "remains." Source is Huckleberry Finn, where the phrase means "shed your coat." 27.36: “The sternwheel’s crawling along:” given that this comes from (again) a Huckleberry Finn account of a Mississippi riverboat, perhaps an echo of “Old Man River:” “He just keeps rolling along.” Compare 363.10-1. 28.2-4: “You storyan Harry chap longa me Harry chap storyan grass women plelthy good trout:” This has been identified by Ian MacArthur and Viviana-Mirela Breslau (Genetic Joyce Studies, 2021) as South Seas pidgin English. "Harry" = trader, store-keeper. "Grass woman" = white man. "plelthy good" = plenty good enough. Joyce got it from a passage in the book Isles of Illusion describing a native fishing with a bow and arrow. Other excerpts occur intermittently throughout FW, usually, as here, when there is reason to think that normal communication has broken down - in this case because the living are trying to talk to the (recently) dead. 28.3: “Harry chap:” compare “Lestrygonians:” “Boylan is a hairy chap,” meaning shrewd, sly. Also, 425.34: “I am altogether a chap too fly and hairyman,” “fly” here meaning: up to anyone’s tricks. Perhaps also a reference to Jacob, who tricked Isaac by pretending to be his brother, the “hairy man” Esau. 28.3: “grass woman:” a grass widow is a woman whose husband is often away; the innuendo is that she is therefore available to other men. (As McHugh notes, Guinevere is mentioned on .1.) 28.5-6: “Boald Tib does be yawning and smirking cat’s hours:” Tib is the household’s cat. (There doesn't seem to be a household dog.) “Cat’s hours” sounds like a variant on “donkey’s years” (14.35), a very long time. 28.7: “the tailor’s daughter:” for the young ALP as a tailor’s daughter, see 624.28-30, 626.9. 28.7-8: “stitch to her last:” stitch to the last: a direction in crocheting 28.8-9: “Or while waiting for winter to fire the enchantement, decoying more nesters to fall down the flue:” once winter comes, the cat expects birds to be lured to her, down the chimney because of the fire’s warmth and light. Also, “nesters” = Nestors, old men attracted to young women, as moths to flame. See next entry. 28.9-10: “It’s an allavalonche that blows nopussy food:” a torrent of birds, avalanche-like, being blown down the chimney, winding up as the cat’s – pussy’s – food 28.11: “talk to her nice of guldenselver:” gold and silver: ALP cherishes the memory of her first meeting with her husband-to-be: he called her Goldilocks and said she had a lovely face for the stage (615.23). Also, he promised her riches. Perhaps also golden and silver anniversaries 28.11-2: “The lips would moisten:” vaginal labia as well as mouth 28.12-5: ”As when you drove with her to Findrinny Fair…she never knew was she on land or sea or swooped through the air:” which perhaps helps to explain one of ALP’s last memories: “Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!” (628.9-10) 28.14-5: “or at sea:” as in “all at sea:” completely disoriented 28.16-7: “second a song:” to back up the main singer – for instance, a baritone seconds a bass 28.17: “last post:” besides military sense (McHugh), the last mail delivery of the day 28.18-9: “forty winks for supper:” postprandial nap. See next entry. 28.20: assotted:” besotted: stupefied or sleepy after supper 28.20-1: “To see is it smarts, full lengths, or swaggers:” she’s reading the fashion news; “smart,” in this context, means stylish. 28.22: “fellah in Fez:” a fella wearing a fez 28.23: “Stella Star with her lucky in goingaways:” she’s still a (movie) star. Her lucky guy – i.e. fiancé. Gangway: they’ve been photographed, going away, on the gangway of their honeymoon cruise. This item surely comes from the newspaper’s Society page. 28.24-5: “Ding Tams he noise about all same Harry chap:” back to the stage-Chinese (cf. 2-4), along with “Harry chap,” but this time at least there’s a cue: the news item about the “China floods” (.24). 28.25: “noise:” knows 28.25: “She’s seeking her way:” to see one’s way: to make out the right course, despite confusing circumstances 28.25-6: “a chickle a chuckle, in and out of their serial story:” publications of the time, including newspapers, often featured serialized fiction. Here she’s reading through the story’s twists and turns, sometimes chuckling, in a fashion that may recall FW’s hen, pecking up grain; hence, I suggest, “serial” as also “cereal.” 28.28: “bluebells:” (champagne) bubbles; also, a garden flower, here “blowing” in the sense of blossoming 28.30: “silver ash or switches:” Bad-children Christmas-stocking rewards. (Silver ash shows up on Google Books as a high-class kind of coal.) Also, no gray in her hair yet 28.35-6: “For, be that samesake sibsubstitute of a hooky salmon, there’s already a big rody ram lad at random on the premises:” compare the "-ram" in “Tristram” (.4); it has been suggested, I believe first by Nat Halper, that astrologically this signals Aries, the ram, supplanting its predecessor Pisces, the fish, on March 21. 29.1: “haunt of the hungred bordles:” possible allusion to song “a hundred bottles of beer on the wall.” Generally considered to have originated mid-20th century, but Google Books shows that it was familiar in some circles during the years FW was written. 29.2: “flourishing like a…buaboabaybohm:” expression: flourishing like a green bay tree; possible echo of Buddha’s bhodi tree 29.2-3: “litting flop a deadlop:” given context, and pairing with “bennbranch,” dead wood: a dead branch being lopped off (and flopping down to the ground). “Litting:” letting. Also, compare “Calypso:” “flop and fall of dung:” he’s defecating on the “lee” side, urinating on the “breezy side,” hence “(for showm!)” (.4), for shame! 29.3: “yardalong:”given sailing instructions (same line: “to lee”), yardarm 29.3: “yardalong (ivoeh!):” Ardilaun in County Galway is an island near the Guinness family estates; Iveagh, County Down, is a home of the Guinness family. 29.4-5: “the height of Brewster’s chimpney:” the chimney of the Guinness Brewery. In “Ithaca,” it is recalled that in a high school (literal) pissing context, Leopold Bloom had attained the “greatest altitude.” 29.5: “chimpney:” “Chimpden” is HCE’s middle name. 29.5: “as broad below as Phineas Barnum:” photographs of Barnum show some rotundity, though nothing spectacular. 29.5-6: “humphing:” “Humphrey” is HCE’s first name. 29.8: “midgit:” again, Issy’s signature: two i’s 29.8: “pucelle:” French for flea. Barnum sideshows included a flea circus. 29.10: “fourfootlers:” perhaps the two girls in the park, with their total of four feet 29.11: “weep the clouds aboon for smiledown witnesses:” with the clouds above for witnesses, smiling down on us; meaning is something on the order of “as God is my witness.” Also, see next entry. 29.14: “zoom:” at the time, meant to fly an airplane at great speed for a short distance 29.18: “Mapqiq:” Macheath of The Beggar’s Opera, here counterpointed with (“sherif” (.17)), sheriff 29.20-1: “paroqial fermament:” ferme is French for farm. 29.21: “one tide on another:” expression: one time or another 29.24: “waxenwench:” a wench, waxing - growing or grown up 29.24: “deadsea dugong:” Aquatic life, including dugongs (known in America as manatees), cannot survive in the Dead Sea. 29.26: “like a fishmummer:” like a fishwife: incessantly yelling and hectoring 29.26: “siktyten:” probably sixteen as well as seventy 29.27: “growing hoarish under his turban:” as in “hoar frost:” his hair is growing whiter with age 29.29: “bulkihood:” FW’s descriptions of HCE often have him being overweight. Also, a collision bulkhead, of the kind mentioned in “Eumaeus,” is the front of a ship or boat, reinforced and sealed off in case of collision. 29.29: “bloats:” boasts, bloatingly; perhaps also (see note above) boats, as verb 29.30: “old offender:” legal term for repeat offender, something like “three-time loser;” can also apply figuratively to any incorrigible behavior 29.30: “ensectuous:” overtone: insect. An earwig is an insect. (Compare 414.26-7.) 29.32: “lashons of languages:” lashings:” Irish idiom for a great, perhaps extravagant supply 29.32: “honnein suit:” honey sweet 29.34: “sober serious:” that is, all kidding aside 29.34: “he is ee and no counter he:” like Popeye’s "I am what I am:” he is he and no doubt about it, he. “Ee:” E is HCE’s siglum.
1 Comment
ajax
10/25/2021 05:42:17 pm
re: 154.18-9: "swell my obolum" - I bet it's phallic. The greek root is 'obelos: rod' (presumably you're cutting your coins from a cylindrical rod). Really getting a lot out of these annotations, thank you for publishing them this way
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