Hello, Barrie Akin
In 1988 the extravagant comforts ( in which I greatly rely on now and enjoy) of digitalized copies of ancient papers and search tools were not easily available, if at all. Priscilla Meyer's "Find What the Sailor Has Hidden" (1988) presents Nablers with riches that are short of miraculous.
I suggest that you check into her finds and, in relation to A R Wallace and Thormodus Torfaeus, examine her chapter on Flora,Fauna, and Faery. Her comments and information will complement your own finds.
A sample:
"Torfaeus (1640-1719) was a learned Icelander educated in Copenhagen who became court historian of Denmark. Of his many works,… perhaps the most important is his History of Vinland (1705). Written in Latin, it first made broadly known the Norse discovery of America.[ ] Torfaeus tackles the problem of the precise location of what the manuscripts called Estotiland,… approximately Canada, using latitude and the position of the sun in conjunction with a consideration of the exact meaning of the Icelandic words eykt ("half past 3 p.m") and non ("3 p.m"). Scientific concepts and linguistic analysis are required to reconstruct historical and geographical fact.[ ]Torfaeus also needed to be a good editor [ ]Torfaeus complains that interpretation is made more difficult by the "barefaced impudence and shameless boldness" of impostors who make up tales of lands they have never seen. [ ] Torfaeus historiographic methods should be applied to reading Pale Fire: collating facts and maps from John Shade's poem and Kinbote's commentary allows us to establish the "real" plotline of Nabokov's novel [ ] Nabokov pairs the natural scientific knowledge used by Torfaeus to retrieve human history with the work of the British naturalist A.R. Wallac, who explored the evolutionary patterns of flora and fauna"(169/170) .”
I'll not copy down the beginning of her entry on A.R.Wallace, just a few highlights.
"When Shade and Kinbote discuss the origin of the soul in Pale Fire, Shade takes the materialist position and Kinbote is aligned with Wallace (quote from Note to line 549). As we have already seen in the context of Boethius philosophy, Kinbote disagrees explicitly with Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest(quote of Note to lines 597-608). Wallace sought knowledge of the human spirit in the supernatural, a term that he disputes [ ] Nabokov voices a closely related idea in Speak, Memory (p.125) [ ]Wallace's chats with Queen Blenda on the Ouija board in Pale Fire reflect Wallace's involvement with spiritualism. He wrote on the subject in The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural (1866) …”(p.170-74).
I agree with you, some of the apparent coincidences are not purely accidental…(“Earle Rounald”, “Count Ottar”, Alexander Pope). Such accretions, it seems to me, are not really “blind alleys” but part of the weave, components of the very texture of Pale Fire, as details to be caressed…
Jansy Mello
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On the assumption that there is little in PF is without some purpose, I have been digging a little into the reference to Thormodus Torfaeus ("TT") in the Note to line 80 of PF to see what I could unearth.
In doing so, I have come across a couple of coincidences, which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else, and which I think are worth passing on.
TT's work on the history of the Orkneys etc. (originally written in Latin) was first published in an English translation in 1866 (publisher: Peter Reid, Wick and others) but the actual translation is older. The translator was the Rev. Alexander Pope, minister of Reay, Caithness.
A copy of the translation is available online in pdf form. The copy is in the Harvard Library and appears to have been there for some considerable time.
See https://ia700402.us.archive.org/7/items/ancienthistoryo00torfgoog/ancienthistoryo00torfgoog.pdf
There are frequent mentions in that work of "Earle Rounald" and there appears to be a single mention (on page 120) of "Count Ottar" (both of whom, with some differences of name and/or spelling, appear in the note to line 71 of PF - "Lord Ronald's Coronach" and "Count Otar" ).
But there is the further coincidence that the Rev. Alexander Pope appears to have been both a contemporary and a relative of the Alexander Pope (i.e. John Shade's Alexander Pope).
See Vol 2, pp 19-22 of the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland:
I can't believe that these coincidences are purely accidental, but whether this is just a delightful blind alley inserted by VN in the manner of an elegant but fruitless line of analysis in a chess problem, or something of greater significance, I leave to others to ponder.
And while I'm on Note 80, the "A R Wallace" named as the other spirit with whom Queen Blenda communicated is presumably the naturalist and contemporary of Darwin's, who (as it happens) believed in spiritualism. He first captured and identified the butterfly Ornithoptera croesus - commonly called Wallace's Golden Birdwing.
Barrie Akin