Dawn of the living dead
What was the first novel to feature a zombie? And what was the first film?
ZOMBIES might have appeared in the oldest text in the world, The Epic Of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem dating to 2,000BC. Ishtar, the goddess of war, love and desire, is rejected by Gilgamesh when she tries to seduce him.
In revenge, she threatens to release a swarm of animated corpses on to the world: ‘I will knock down the gates of the netherworld, I will smash the door posts and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up and eat the living!’
There are threats of a zombie apocalypse in the Bible. Zechariah 14:12: ‘And the Lord will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will be like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away.’
Isaiah 26:19–20: ‘But your dead will live; their bodies will rise...go, my people, enter your rooms and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves until their wrath has passed us by.’
Frankenstein, written in 1823 by Mary Shelley, prefigures many 20th-century ideas about zombies, in that the resurrection of the dead is portrayed as a scientific rather than a mystical process, and the resurrected dead are degraded and more violent than their living selves.
All the modern elements were combined in H. P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West – Reanimator (1921). This was a series of short stories featuring a mad scientist who tries to revive human corpses.
Though Lovecraft does not use the word zombie, his creatures bore all the hallmarks of the modern zombie, ie animalistic and uncontrollable. Though considered by critics, and himself, as some of his poorest stories, they were to prove highly influential.
It was American occultist William Seabrook who popularised the term zombie in The Magic Island (1929).
Praised by the New York Evening Post as ‘the best and most thrilling book of exploration’, this 1929 volume offers first-hand accounts of Haitian voodoo rituals.
Seabrook’s book became the basis for the first zombie film, White Zombie (1932), about a woman’s transformation into a zombie by a voodoo master. Bela Lugosi stars as the antagonist, ‘Murder’ Legendre, with Madge Bellamy playing his victim.
George A Romero (1940-2017) reinvented the genre in Night Of The Living Dead (1968) by relocating the action to contemporary America and transforming the zombies into flesh-eating ghouls.
Romero was inspired by Richard Matheson’s vampire novel I Am Legend. Romero’s ruthless nihilism, as he confounded audience expectations by mercilessly killing off all his good characters, was all his own. Jared Bourke, Derbyshire.
Are polar bear numbers becoming dangerously high?
ONE of the enduring images of Al Gore’s famous climate change movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was a cartoon of a polar bear struggling to climb onto a piece of sea ice, followed by Gore explain- ing how polar bears are disappearing because the Arctic is melting.
However, the inconvenient truth for Gore is that new population estimates from the 2016 Scientific Working Group demonstrate polar bears are thriving. The current population numbers of 22,633 to 32,257 compare to 2005’s figures of 20,000 to 25,000 bears.
In 2008, stories of a polar bear crisis inspired California firefighter Zac Unger to move to Canada to chart their decline and raise awareness of their plight, but he found polar bears were thriving.
In his 2013 book Never Look A Polar Bear In The Eye, he wrote: ‘It was going to be a mournful elegy to the dying polar bears... I ended up writing a nuanced book about big egos, shaky science and weird characters.’
However, many still believe polar bears are endangered. According to the WWF UK Polar Programme, ‘polar bears are at a crossroads, and climate change and loss of Arctic summer sea ice is the biggest threat to their future.’
James Lesser, St Andrews, Fife.
How did the tally stick system of money used in England work, and was it free from corruption?
TALLY sticks were introduced by Henry I, fourth son of William the Conqueror, when he came to the throne in 1100. Needing a supply of money, he decided rods of wood, issued by his treasury, would serve as the country’s currency.
Tally sticks were narrow shafts, originally hazel but subsequently willow, varying in length from 8in to as long as 3ft, flattened with a knife. Higher denominations were indicated by deep notches on the face of one side of the stick, lower denominations were represented by smaller notches.
After the stick had been notched, it was split lengthways, with one piece slightly longer than the other – that piece was ‘the stock’ (a term still used in banking); the debtor’s piece was ‘the foil’.
The system is described in the 12th-century Dialogus de Scaccario (The Dialogue Concerning The Exchequer): ‘At the top of the tally a cut is made, the thickness of the palm of the hand, to represent a thousand pounds; then a hundred pounds by a cut the breadth of a thumb; twenty pounds, the breadth of the little finger; a single pound, the width of a swollen barleycorn; a shilling rather narrower; then a penny is marked by a single cut without removing any wood.’
The debt’s details were printed in ink on the wood; for instance: ‘From the hamlet of Huntingdon for transgressions and contempt. In the 22nd year of King Edward I. Easter, 1294. Amount 3.6.8.’
The system was almost impossible to counterfeit. The wood grain, notches and ink inscriptions all had to match.
This could only come about if both pieces came from the same tally stick. Attempts at fraud were punishable by death.
The system was replaced by paper ledgers in 1834 after decades of attempts to modernise. To celebrate, it was decided to burn the sticks – six centuries of irreplaceable monetary records – in a stove in the House of Lords.
So it was that the House of Lords, then the House of Commons, and almost the entire Palace of Westminster – a building as old as the tally stick system itself – was burned to the ground.