Back to the Rhine

[mer]

I've been up and down the Rhine four? five? times this weekend. In pictures, in Wikipedia entries, in bad Google translations from German, in tourist brochures, in maps hoarded from my Germany trip, in maps discovered online...

I very nearly have a working map for my novel. I would even call it "largely accurate." It is more likely to be missing places than to have wrong places added in, I think, so that's cool. So, from Bonn to Bingen, I know my 1133 Rhine valley. Woo. Hoo.

In addition to the map, I have index cards for each place along the way, including founding dates and important happenings and my best etymologies. I have not yet decided if I'm using German names or evocative English translations of German names or some of each. (The problem is that for every "Cloud Castle" there's an untranslatable word like "the Wied River." Wied, apparently, goes back to the beginning of time or something. Because no one anywhere I can find knows what it means. Possibly if I were fluent in German I could find an etymology.... But I'm not. How on earth was Romanian easier?)

And so, that's what I did with my weekend.

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I just learned over the weekend that Ashkenazi Jews (e.g. me) originally came from Jewish settlements in towns along the Rhine - they formed from about 400 AD to 1100AD, at which point they were about 3% of world Jewry, then began migrating to points east (Poland, Russia, the Pale of Settlement) from about 1100 to 1900. By 1931, Ashkenazim were 91% of world Jewry. (My source is Wikipedia, so take all details with the usual helping of salt.)

So anyway, apparently the 1133 Rhine valley demographics included a bit of diversity!