Dear Alice Your name always reminds me of that Victorian Alice from Oxford the city where I grew up reading avidly Lewis Carrol, Tolkien and C.S.Lewis wo all wrote in my home town.
How do A.I.s make their creativity – I asked for Alice in Wonderland at the court of the Red Queen in the style of Studio Ghibli directed by Hagao Migazhi and this confusion of the Caterpillar’s seat the Mad Hatters Tea Party and the Red Queen’s Court is the result! Other Alice’s apply – perhaps your parents loved the song “My Alice Blue Gown” whatever the reason for your naming it is a lovely name…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my second year and I was on List 10. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 16 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent. Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
PS I wrote about the song “My Alice Blue Gown” here…
But where did the nursery rhyme draw its inspiration from? At simplest, some believe that the rhyme draws on nothing more than that “hearts” rhymes with “tarts” but a more intriguing answer is that “The Queen of Hearts” was “Elizabeth, daughter of James I. This unfortunate Queen of Bohemia was so called in the Low Countries from her amiable character and engaging manners, even in her lowest estate. (1596-1652)” 1
Elizabeth had a very eventful life with many ups and downs, – for example, had the gunpowder Plot succeeded in killing her father James I and the protestant hierarchy, Elizabeth was to be placed on the throne of England as a Catholic queen. She was a desirable catch and had many significant suitors, and Frederick (Friedrich) V, Count Palatine of the Rhine was chosen but became very much a love match producing thirteen children over a twenty-year marriage.
Frederic was offered the elected position of King of Bohemia – in part to thwart the reign of Archduke Ferdinand – the previous incumbent, but after just one year, Frederic and his Queen Elizabeth were ousted again by Frederic. You can read a much fuller account of Elizabeth’s life here. Suffice it to say that Elizabeth lived happily in the Hague until, widowed – she returned to England upon the restoration of the Stuarts with the accession of Charles II. So Elizabeth could well have been the model for the Queen of Hearts, although, in the context of Bohemia, she and Frederick were called the Winter King and Queen due to the shortness of their reign and the season of the battle that removed them.
The nursery rhyme The Queen of Hearts famously features in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” where the Queen of Hearts is very unpleasant and whose catchphrase is “Off with their heads!”. The nursery rhyme is presented in evidence in Chapter XI “Who Stole the Tarts?” – a chapter that lampoons the British legal system…
Many people would like to be remembered in perpetuity, but in the case of Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling, he would probably have preferred not to become a byword for traitor. Rather, he would have liked to be remembered for his attempts to combine Christian thought with contemporary physics to produce a “new world religion.” Universism. Unfortunately, he strayed down the path of Nordic racial superiority (he was Norwegian) and fell under the spell of Hitler facilitating the Nazi invasion of Norway and temporarily being placed in charge… Go here for a fuller account.
Vidkun Quisling Vidkun Quisling, leader of the collaborationist Norwegian government, returns a salute during a ceremony in Oslo. Norway, after April 1940. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
There are many other people whose names have become Eponyms,
Louis Pasteur – Pasteurisation,
Lord Cardigan – Cardigans obs!,
4th Earl of Sandwich – Sandwiches, a surprisingly late invention…
Hoover and now Dyson brand names that became eponymous,
Boycott – a beastly Estate Manager who caused his tenants to stop harvesting and paying him, and local shops to refuse to serve him
Adolphe Sax – inventor of the Saxophone,
Dahlia, after Anders Dahl, an 18th-century Swedish botanist
Bloomers, after Amelia Bloomer, a campaigner for women’s suffrage
Franz Anton Mesmer, who gives us Mesmerise (hypnotise)
The 4th earl of Sandwich – gambler who invented a food he could eat at the gambling table so as not to miss the action…
You can find more here…
There are no Cant Languages beginning with “Q” in the Wikipedia article on that subject.
