"Inside the shrine, Zukovskis, 61, begins with a ritual of gratitude. 'We can feel safe because of support from Britain, the United States,' he says, before listing several other nations. '
Regardless of what Mordor [Russia] does, Ukraine is safeguarded. We’re on their side, and they’re on ours.'... The rebirth of the Baltic countries’ pre-Christian faiths has been intimately bound up with geopolitics ever since they were reconstructed by Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians under Russian rule before the First World War. After the region was recaptured by the USSR in 1944, neopaganism was banned.... [This] faith is the product of decades of efforts to reconstruct the nature-rooted spirituality that prevailed in the Baltic before the Teutonic knights swept in and imposed Christianity at swordpoint. 'The main gods that we respect are basically connected to what is earth, what is fire; the most basic things for living that we cherish,' says Laimutis Vasilevicius, 68, a Romuva priest in Panevezys. So, for example, the shiver you might feel when something significant happens is identified as the work of Perkunas, the thunder deity."
From "The rituals of Paganism are making a comeback deep in the Baltic states/Today the old religions — or a modern approximation — are being revived after being suppressed by missionaries and then the USSR" (London Times).
I was interested in that stray "Mordor [Russia]." Googling, I found this BBC article from January 2016:
Google has fixed a bug in an online tool after it began translating "Russian Federation" to "Mordor".
Mordor is the name of a fictional region nicknamed "Land of Shadow" in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books.
In addition, "Russians" was translated to "occupiers" and the surname of Sergey Lavrov, the country's Foreign Minister, to "sad little horse".
The errors had been introduced to Google Translate's Ukrainian to Russian service automatically, Google said.
Google claimed that these translations were not introduced by human manipulation but somehow happened through its automatic process of looking for "patterns in hundreds of millions of documents"! Ha ha. Alternatively, maybe Perkunas did it.
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So they're converting back to their Iron Age deity away from one of a historical period.
pdug: Do you mean away from Bronze Age historical period?
Latvian try to cross Ogre River.
Has dog, potato, and dead son’s body. Can only take two across river in one time.
If leave dog with potato or corpse, dog eat them. Is very sad.
Also is not good boat.
Personal observation: Fantasy fiction has long borrowed the syllables of the crusades and European history for heroes versus villains. These conventions were natural because the authors lived in Europe, and perhaps canonized by Tolkien. LOTR's regions, races, and species are often compared to the politics of World War II.
Heroes: English, French, Scandinavian, and Italian
* Richard
* William
* Harold
* Elron, Legolas, Aragorn, Arwin
Villains: Death themed, German, and Arabic
* Mordor (Spanish fighting the Moors who came in from N. Africa; alternative an allusion to murder)
* Voldemort (Mort = perhaps death, per Harry Potter)
* Any German name (following Hitler)
* Al prefix (Spain versus the Moors and Arabic names)
Etc.
Gimme that old time religion!
In Canterbury Tales, the knight has returned from Crusading. In the Baltic. It was a thing for NW-European knights, closer to home so you could crusade all summer and still get back home for Christmas.
Of course, most people have no idea that Crusaders weren't all to be found in the Holy Lands (tm)--that would obscure the Islamophobia narrative too much.
pdug: nevermind you explained on the other thread
Google claimed that these translations were not introduced by human manipulation but somehow happened through its automatic process of looking for "patterns in hundreds of millions of documents"! Ha ha.
That's how their translation software comes up with contextualized dictionaries, so ha ha ha.
When the Czechs and Pole stop beating wives and the Russians stop pimping them, I might give a shit about their culture.
I am reading Anton Wessel's Was Europe Ever Really Christian? which details how unconverted so many places were. I wonder if Germany ever became Christian, really. (And yes, I was once Lutheran and know some of the high points.)
@ Enigma - I have been hearing that speculation since the 70s, but you can only sustain it with a superficial analysis, there's just too much cherry-picking in the data. Tolkien was very intentional that he was choosing particular sounds in names because his audience was English. He wanted that flavor for that audience. He uses Anglo-Saxon for Rohan, for example, but is clear that this is an impressionistic representation, not what they actually spoke. He was a freidn of Owen Barfield and greatly admired his Poetic Diction. Fantasy authors rely on this impressionistic naming intentionally, and understand that it must necessary stem from a very narrow range of cultures. CS Lewis tried to broaden this to more mythologies, but it works less well. Each culture can only produce such things for themselves. The themes and plots may be shared or even universal, but the atmosphere, the Kappa element is necessarily narrow.
There is a marvelous essay about it with strong reference to Lewis and Larry Niven. https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2015/05/11/atmosphere/
Everyone knows Mordor exists along the Potomac River, just a little northeast of Virginia.
If I recall correctly Tolkien wrote that Frodo Baggins was a pseud--the real hobbit's real name was Maura Libingi. But that won't grab Anglophone kids.
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