Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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859

The Wooing of Olaf Tryggvason

An aristocratic widow advertises for a husband, and among the line-up of natty and noble suitors is a rough-and-ready Olaf Tryggvason.

In 984, exiled Norwegian prince Olaf Tryggvason lost his wife Geira, and went on a four-year grief-stricken rampage through Britain, before suddenly becoming a Christian in the Isles of Scilly. Hearing that Gyda, the King of Dublin’s sister, had summoned a Thing (a Viking council) to choose a husband, Olaf returned to England.

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Picture: Morgan Library & Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

860

A Man Called Mouse

In an enduring fable from the Kathasaritsagara, an Indian merchant explains how he acquired his nickname.

Gunadhya, sixth-century narrator of this tale from the Kathasaritsagara, was in Pratisthana (Paithan) watching little knots of men in the city conducting their business. They included bookies promising treasure to gamblers, but among the merchants was a man who had a better way to become rich.

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Picture: Anonymous photo circa 1870, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

861

Shakuntala and the Lost Ring

The lovely Shakuntala is wooed by a great King, but almost at once he forgets her.

‘The Recognition of Shakuntala’ is a play by fifth-century Indian dramatist Kalidasa, derived from the ancient Mahabharata, and made popular in Georgian England by Calcutta judge William Jones. It tells of a shy young woman who is wooed and wedded by a great King, who afterwards cannot remember her at all.

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Picture: By Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

862

A Personal Favour

Over a hundred young Greeks were slated to be shot after resistance fighters and British forces sabotaged an airfield.

The German occupation of Greece began in 1941, and continued for three years of forced labour, summary executions, and famines. By the summer of 1944, Berlin was struggling to keep hold of the Mediterranean, but airbases popping up on the Greek islands might have been a grave setback for the Allied cause.

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Picture: © Rene Boulay, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

863

A Tale of Three Rivers

The Rivers Son and Narmada rise together in the hills of Amarkantak, but because of Johilla they never meet again.

William Sleeman, after whom the little village of Sleemanabad in Madhya Pradesh is named, retold a classic Indian fable in an open letter to his sister. It is a love story of three rivers, the Narmada (Nerbudda), the Son and the Johila, and explains why the Narmada and the Son rise in the same place in central India, but flow in opposite directions.

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Picture: From the Walters Art Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain. . Source.

864

A Woman of Spirit

Alice was given a choice between her carriage and lady’s maid on the one hand, and Richard Grey on the other.

Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey tells the tale of a young woman forced to earn a meagre and humiliating living as a governess. The shock of employment and the utterly alien lives of her employers is hard to bear, but no daughter of Richard and Alice Grey was afraid of a little self-sacrifice.

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Picture: By John Constable (1776-1837), via Tate Britain and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.