A little off-topic.
In revising the article I'm writing for the Old English Newsletter abou Beowulf: Prince of the Geats, I realized that I had talked about Nazis quite a bit, but had given short shrift to the Odinists. I've spent my morning wading through 84 pages of e-mails from Odinists protesting the casting of a black Beowulf. As might be expected, they ranged from the polite and reasoned to vicious and threatening.
One odd thing I noticed, however, was that the writers frequently accused B:PotG of "calumniating, misrepresenting, and traducing" their culture or religion -- that exact phrase, over and over. In many of those letters, the writers threaten to lodge "hate crime" charges against the producers, so I began to wonder if maybe some country or another uses that phrase in their "hate crimes" legislation. After checking a bit more, I found writers from England, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States all using that same formula, so if it is a reference to specific legislation, I can't pin down the country.
Does anyone out there know the significance of the exact phrase "calumniating, misrepresenting and traducing?"
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I don't have the exact phrase, but some creative google searching (procrastination) suggests that all three are related to slander.
ReplyDeleteHere is a link that uses the term "traducing" to describe BPotG. The post is from January 2006. http://www.princeofthelies.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteThe post also links to what I might consider an extraordinarily nationalist site.
Yes, I thought about the "Prince of the Lies" site, and thought maybe the e-mailers had read about it there and were just repeating that language, but some of the e-mails pre-date it.
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