![]() ![]() It is an image of womanhood as essentially confined and restricted full participation in the world is forbidden and fatal. She sets out on a pathetic boat trip to Camelot, but by the time she arrives the curse has had its effect and she is dead. When she spies Lancelot she is smitten and looks directly at him: the mirror shatters and she is doomed. Tennyson provided them with the narrative, a story in which the lady is cursed only to see the world through a mirror. “The story of the Lady of Shalott created an extraordinarily resonant echo in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination Pre-Raphaelite artists, looking for images that expressed what they saw as a truly medieval perspective, returned to it time and time again. In contrast to the Romans, the Barbarians were lacking in refinement, primitive, ignorant, brutal, rapacious, destructive and cruel.” And of course 'barbarian' has become a by-word for the very opposite of everything we consider civilized. Once the term had the might and majesty of Rome behind it, the Roman interpretation became the only one that counted, and the peoples whom they called Barbarians became forever branded – be they Spaniards, Britons, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, Persians or Syrians. The Romans adopted the Greek word and used it to label (and usually libel) the peoples who surrounded their own world. The same word, Barbara, appears in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, meaning 'stammering, gibbering' – in other words, alien. It had been used by the Ancient Greeks to describe non-Greek people whose language they couldn't understand and who therefore seemed to babble unintelligibly: 'Ba ba ba'. ![]() “WHO WERE THE BARBARIANS? Nobody ever called themselves 'barbarians'. ![]()
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