Next up on the non-fiction block is Hans Kohn's The Idea of Nationalism. From what little I've read of it so far, it looks like it's exactly the book I needed to get my head into an old, academic, Beowulf-as-pre-national-epic project (Tongues in Jars, where you can find my translations of the poem, is something of a starting point for this project). The end point of this project is likely a book (or perhaps just a long piece) about how Beowulf is the result of the Anglo-Saxons taking Celtic tales and mixing them with their own epic/heroic leanings. Or, if not the result, that the epic poem is at least the expression of an attempt to do so. Nationalism comes into the project via the Anglo-Saxon's obsession with finding their place in the world as a people.
Though, Hans Kohn would have some choice words for anyone who posited that nationalism (at least as we know it) existed before the 18th century.
Yes, having been published in 1943, Mr. Kohn has some very starchy ideas that just don't hold water any more. That is, if they ever did at all.
Among these ideas is that "alien [food and customs]...appear to [a person] unintelligible and indigestible" (5). As someone with Irish and Polish roots who would eat sushi on a daily basis if he could, I'd say Kohn has some explaining to do. Explaining that he never gets around to, because such statements are just taken as fact.
Interestingly, though, in the next paragraph Kohn writes: "The more primitive men are, the stronger will be their distrust of strangers[.]"
Given that idea, two things are apparent: First, we've certainly become much more civilized over the past 70 years; and second, reading through this book could get a little bumpy.
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