Good knight’s sweetheart
QUESTION How many artworks did Edmund Leighton paint and how valuable are they?
EDMUND LEIGHTON was one of the most distinctive and popular artists of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He specialised in highly romanticised scenes of heroic knights, damsels in distress, romantic bards and mournful kings.
He was prolific, with at least 320 works catalogued. His series of chivalric works painted around the turn of the 20th century are worth in excess of £500,000. Lesser works have sold for between £20,000 and £50,000.
The 1900 painting God Speed and 1901’s The Accolade have been reproduced in posters sold all over the world. God Speed, depicting an armoured knight departing to war and leaving his beloved, sold for £481,000 at Sotheby’s in 1988.
Leighton was born in London in 1852. He was just three when his father Charles, a fine portrait artist, died.
His family encouraged him to become a tea merchant, but he was always fascinated with art and took evening classes at the South Kensington School of Art before being accepted by the Royal Academy of Art School.
Painting a generation after the pre-Raphaelite movement, he produced similar subjects with unequalled fervour.
Though he was elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1887, he was never voted in as an associate of the Royal Academy. However, he exhibited there for more than 40 years.
His other famous works include The End Of The Song, The Queen Kisses The Sleeping Poet Alain Chartier and Vox Populi.
Elaine Morrisby, Lyme Regis, Dorset.
QUESTION Could the Biden presidential election be the last where English is the first language of the majority of the U.S. population?
THOUGH the u.S. does not have an official language, there’s no question that English is the most spoken and will be for some time to come.
There are 254 million native English speakers, which is more than 67 per cent of the population. Spanish is the second most spoken language with 43 million speakers. Chinese (including Cantonese, mandarin and other varieties) is third with three million.
migrants are under pressure to speak English and by the third generation, many have lost their native language.
It is interesting to note that by 2050 there will be more Spanish speakers in the u.S. than in Spain.
G. Smithson, Malvern, Worcs.
QUESTION What was the fish called snoek served in restaurants during the 1940s?
SNOEK is a species of snake mackerel (Thyrsites atun), so-called because of its long, thin body, though it isn’t a mackerel. A full-grown fish can reach up to 7 ft.
It is plentiful from namibia to the Cape provinces and was given its name by dutch settlers in South Africa, who thought it looked similar to pike, which are called snoek in the netherlands.
during World War II, it was caught and canned in South Africa and shipped to Britain where, even considering wartime shortages, people didn’t take to it.
Recipes were created at the instigation of the Government in the hope of making it more palatable, but it was difficult to market it.
One recipe was snoek piquant, which combined half a tin of mashed snoek with spring onions, vinegar and golden syrup.
This odd concoction was intended to be served cold with a salad.
At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of tins remained unsold on the shelves of grocer’s shops. They were re-labelled as cat food, selling for a fraction of the original price.
dried snoek is part of the staple diet of poorer rural communities in namibia and South Africa. It is used in soups or stews with home-grown vegetables.
It is also popular with game fishermen, though they are less likely to eat it!
Bob Cubitt, Northampton.
QUESTION Was the Bible translated into Anglo-Saxon?
AS WELL as efforts to translate sections of the Bible into the English of the day, as detailed in a previous answer, an important landmark in the history of Bible production occurred in Anglo-Saxon times.
Early Christians used the codex, which was a prototype of the book. The Gospels would cover a scroll of 104 ft or a compact codex of handwritten manuscripts.
In the 6th century, Flavius Cassiodorus took an important step towards widespread production of one-volume Bibles.
He was passionate about the transmission of the Scriptures and proved to be a careful Bible editor.
under his direction, scrupulous translators and grammarians painstakingly worked to achieve accuracy. They produced three editions of the Bible, including the Latin Vulgate and the Codex Grandior, which means larger codex. They brought all the books of the Bible together in a single volume.
After the death of Cassiodorus, the Codex Grandior was brought to the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow in northumbria by the Anglo-Saxon monk Ceolfrith in Ad678. The monks produced three Bibles as complete volumes.
Though the original Codex Grandior is lost, the only surviving copy was taken to the Italian monastery library of mount Amiata, from which it took its name, Codex Amiatinus.
In 1782, it was moved to the medicean-Laurentian Library in Florence, where it is one of its most treasured possessions.
T. V. Hiscock, Barnstaple, Devon.
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