Once a young soccer star named Jimmy from Manchester, England played on a scholarship for UC Santa Barbara.  His family couldn’t afford to fly him home for the holidays, so a professor invited him to stay with her family every Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I was friends with that professor’s three brothers in Fairbanks who knew I played soccer a long time.   One of them said Jimmy had become a coach with Manchester United, the Yankees of the English Premier League, and that Jimmy had promised them MU game tickets if they ever visited England.  My friends couldn’t make that trip, but, when they learned I was about to go to London, they contacted Jimmy and ask if he’d offer me the free ticket.  Eight days later I was on the train to Manchester where I learned that Jimmy wasn’t a coach, but worked for some shady organization and oversaw all the booths selling team scarves, programs, etc. outside the stadium. Tickets to see an MU game are hard to come by, but it turned out those booths also illegally scalped game tickets, so Jimmy had no problem getting some for me, him, and his parents and sister.

            Since downtown parking was impossible Jimmy’s connections proved fruitful the next day as he squired me to three notable Manchester libraries where every parking lot had a “full” sign until Jimmy reasoned with the attendant. First was the University of Manchester Library (where a librarian friend of Jimmy’s had a project identifying and cataloging figures in 18^th century political cartoons), then the Chetham Library (where another librarian friend gave us a tour of “the oldest public library in Britain” and took our picture as we sat in the alcove where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sat to work out “The Communist Manifesto”), and finally the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, famous for its rare book collection.   John Rylands was Manchester’s first millionaire, and when he died in 1888 his widow commissioned “one of the most outstanding examples of neo-Gothic architecture in all of Europe.”  It is stunning, as are its rare possessions, like their Gutenberg Bible (one of forty-eight still existing), and their Wesley Collection: 2,000 books, hymnals, liturgies and other works related to British Wesleyan Methodism. 

One of those Methodist items is Charles Wesley’s original handwritten lyric for the well-known carol, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!”  Wesley composed over 6,000 hymn lyrics and poems, but he actually began this one with “Hark! How All the Welkins Ring!”  A welkin is “an archaic term for firmament of heavens,” according to Methodist.org.uk, and it was “edited out of a subsequent version” by a friend of Wesley who also fine-tuned some of the hymn’s other words.  Wesley also titled it “Hymn for Christmas Day” and set it to a slow, dirge-like tune written for Easter.  Meanwhile, Felix Mendelssohn had composed a Festgesang (“Festive Hymn”) that was soon adapted as the familiar “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” carol we know today.

Modern heralds are those guys who’ll rig up a family crest for a fee, but their roles were more involved in ancient times.  The Greeks called them “kerykes” and they were originally part  of the “demigourgoi,” public workers who Homer described as starting campfires, cooking, scavenging corpses from the battlefields, and acting as umpires in the traditional funereal games.  But their main role was as announcers during large gatherings.  The Ancient Olympics website notes that “Addressing this crowd was the task of professionals. A trumpeter asked for attention with the sound of his instrument, which was much longer than a modern trumpet. A herald with a loud voice would then speak to the public, for example to announce the start of the competitions ….  Originally, heralds and trumpeters had a purely organizational function, but gradually they also started competing among each other” and “contests for heralds and trumpeters were introduced in the Olympics of 396 BC …. Not the herald with the most agreeable voice, but the man who could shout both louder and clearer than the others would win.”

The winner for most hymnal poems doesn’t go to Charles Wesley, who wrote 6,000,  but to American Fanny Crosby who composed around 9,000 in the last half of the 1800s.  Despite being blind from birth and having “barely legible handwriting,” she graduated from college, majored in music, and devoted her life to serving the needy in rescue missions and identified as a mission worker instead of a poet.  Crosby began composing poems as a girl, (P.T. Barnum bought her first one), and she was inspired by the music of Stephen Foster and strove to create rousing evangelical hymns to suit the lively revival meetings of her era.

Enthusiasm takes on many forms besides rare book collecting, and especially religious fervor.  Consider the treatment of the Yazidis by the Islamic State fanatics.  According to Britannica.com, the Yazidis are a “a Kurdish religious minority found primarily in northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northern Syria, the Caucasus region, and parts of Iran.”  Their surviving numbers are uncertain since ISIS persecuted them as devil worshippers.  The Yazidis believe “they were created quite separately from the rest of humankind, being descended from Adam but not from Eve …. The Yazīdī cosmogony holds that a supreme creator god made the world and then ended his involvement with it, leaving it in the control of seven divine beings. The chief divine being is Malak Ṭāʾūs (“Peacock Angel”), who is worshipped in the form of a peacock. Malak Ṭāʾūs has often been identified by outsiders with the Judeo-Christian figure of Satan, causing the Yazīdīs to be inaccurately described as Devil worshippers.”  That was the ISIS’ excuse for slaughtering them in Iraq and Syria, killing every male above the age of twelve who didn’t agree to convert to Islam, and selling at least 7,000 Yazidi women into slavery.

Overeager religious zealotry is frightening, as we’re seeing in our own country where some Christian fanatics want to tell everyone else how to think by banning books they don’t like.  Historically, banning books to restrict all knowledge in an effort to compel conformation to the repressor’s beliefs is how repressive governments begin.  The Alaska Attorney General is an example; last week he sent out starkly threatening letters (https://law.alaska.gov/pdf/press/231117-Letter-Libraries.pdf ) to every school and public librarian in the state warning of all the ways they can be persecuted for giving “inappropriate” books about sexuality to children under the age of 18.  “Inappropriate” is a highly subjective terms and the AG intentionally didn’t define it, thereby intimidating librarians with jail if a child comes into their library and finds a book the AG and Moms For Liberty find “inappropriate.”  The AG never discussed his act of terrorism with the Alaska library community, and he and the Governor should be ashamed for trying to make political hay out of this hot issue.

Perhaps they should cool off with a little dwile flonking.  “History’s Weirdest Sports,” an online historycollection.com article by Tim Flight, describes dwile flonking as a competition usually held in English pubs between two teams of twelve players.  A dwile is a beer-soacked bar rag, according to “the Friends of Lewes Arm” pub (“the Madison Square Garden of the Dwile Flonking world”).  “The rules of the game are impenetrable and the result is always contested.  A ‘dull witted person’ is chosen as the referee or ‘jobanowl’, and the two teams decide who flonks first by tossing a sugar beet. The game begins when the jobanowl shouts, ‘Here y’go t’gither!’ … The non-flonking team joins hands and dances in a circle around a member of the flonking team, a practice known as ‘girting’. The flonker dips his dwile-tipped ‘driveller’ (a pole 2–3 ft long and made from hazel or yew) into a bucket of beer, then spins around in the opposite direction to the girters and flonks his dwile at them.  If the dwile misses completely it is known as a ‘swadge’. When this happens, the flonker must drink the contents of an ale-filled ‘gazunder’ (chamber pot)  before the wet dwile is passed from hand to hand along the line of now non-girting girters chanting the ceremonial mantra of ‘pot pot pot’.  A full game comprises two “snurds”, each snurd being one team taking a turn at girtin.”

That’s a healthier pastime than Fox-Tossing, described by Wikipedia as “a competitive blood sport popular in parts of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It involved throwing live foxes and other animals high into the air. It was practiced by members of the aristocracy in an enclosed patch of ground or in a courtyard, using slings with a person on each end to catapult the animal upwards. It was particularly popular for mixed couples” and invariably deadly for the foxes.  Personally, for his callous, un-American treatment of our state’s librarians, I’d prefer seeing the Attorney General compete in Ferret-Legging, in which competitors strive to see who can “keep the most ferrets down their trousers for the longest period of time.”  The sport began back when commoners couldn’t own guns or hunting dogs and relied on ferrets to catch rabbits for dinner.  When approached by game wardens, the poachers hid their aggressive, sharp-toothed ferrets in their pants.  Flight noted that “Since the 1970s, Ferret-Legging has inexplicably risen in popularity.”  Perhaps we should all take Bishop William Warburton’s admonition to heart: “Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.”