Active History

Dani K. Inkpen

“History should make you feel weird.” So proclaims a widely touted slogan of history nerds. While there is much in the world foisting weirdness upon us today, too rarely do we intentionally seek the off-beat. History students should. “Weird,” though it has come to mean uncanny or bizarre, has its roots in the idea of the turning of events. The Old English wyrd meant the principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined. In a word, fate. It may have come from older words meaning “to turn” or “to wind” thus referencing the Roman Parcae and their northern counterparts, the Norns: the three women, who spun, measured, and irrevocably cut life’s thread. Shakespeare’s “Weyard Sisters” retain this association in their scrying of Macbeth’s destiny. These are fitting associations for the study of the past. For is not history’s chief concern understanding how the threads of past events are woven into the ever growing, shifting, impossibly complex tapestry from which springs our present predicament?

But history should make you feel weird for less etymological reasons. The more recent meaning of “weird,” aligning it with the bizarre, is a good starting point for inquiry. Cultural historian Robert Darnton was on to this when he followed the trail of his own ignorance. He (understandably) didn’t get what was so funny to eighteenth-century Frenchmen about murdering and mutilating cats. “Our own inability to get [a] joke is an indication of the distance that separates us,” he observed, “the perception of distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation.” I tell my first-year history students: If you feel weird because you don’t “get it,” you’re in the right place to start learning.

Recently, I found myself feeling weird in a small room shaped like an uppercase E. Boxed in by looming rows of bounded journals, at the end of my worktable a young former Duke of Edinburgh was framed and mounted, his orca sleek hair dissolving into the black shadows surrounding him. Next to her husband’s portrait, an even younger Queen Elizabeth II, gowned and crowned, alighted from a royal Rolls-Royce at the doors of Lincoln’s Inn on December 9^th, 1957. I was in the heart of Empire. To my left, on another rectangular wooden table, an old-fashioned ice axe with a smooth wooden shaft rested casually as if its owner would soon return for it. I later learned it belonged to Andrew (Sandy) Irvine, a young mountaineer who was lost on Chomolungma (Everest) with George Mallory in 1924. He wasn’t coming back for it.

I was in the library of the Alpine Club of London. The Alpine Club, first of its name, founded 100 years before Elizabeth arrived at the Lincoln Inn. Before me sat a large, royal blue binder with a black spine and black corner lapels. “Original letters” its cover stated, “Farrar, Freshfield, Adams, Reilly, Whymper.” These were storied names in the history of mountaineering. Indeed, so many stories have been pinned to these names that recently scholars and mountain history enthusiasts have rightly demanded other stories about other people. Toward the back of the volume, after pages of dizzying swirls and swooping curlicues the Victorian script gave way to a neatly printed letter:

LETTERS BY THE REV. CHARLES HUDSON AND EDWARD WHYMPER RELATING TO THE MATTERHORN DISASTER OF 1865

The Matterhorn Disaster. The triumph and failure that is said to have shuttered the “Golden Age” of Alpine Mountaineering in July 1865. Edward Whymper (1840-1911), Rev. Charles Hudson (1828-65), Lord Francis Douglas (1847-65), Douglas Hadow (1846-65), Michel Croz (1830-65), and the father (1820-1888) and son (1843-1923) guides both named Peter Taugwalder, had summitted the technically challenging mountain, but only three survived. The others plummeted to their deaths after the young Hadow lost his footing and dragged Hudson, Douglas, and Croz off the mountainside. All would have perished had the rope not snapped, sparing Whymper and the Taugwalders a mutilating 4000-metre fall.