15
votes
Origin of the war-cry "Eulalia" in Brian Jacques's Redwall series?
According to Brian Jacques, as related in a live-action segment for the TV series:
That was one of the Norse war cries, the Vikings, the sea-wolves, the Norsemen, and the Celts used to use it when ...
- 8,232
6
votes
Origin of the war-cry "Eulalia" in Brian Jacques's Redwall series?
The historian T. L. Kington Oliphant claimed that “Eulalia” was (part of) the war-cry of Barcelona during the War of the Spanish Succession and afterwards. (Saint Eulalia is the patron saint of ...
- 40.9k
5
votes
Accepted
How did Ibsen's writing in A Doll's House influence the James Joyce character Molly Bloom?
While Ibsen was indeed a great influence on Joyce in many ways,
there is no evidence that Ibsen's writing in A Doll's House influenced Joyce's character Molly Bloom from Ulysses.
While the onus really ...
- 1,566
5
votes
Which traits of Milton's Lucifer from "Paradise Lost" did Neil Gaiman carry to "The Sandman"?
Neil Gaiman described his concept for Season of Mists, the Sandman story which introduces Lucifer as a major character, in these terms:
The story was inspired loosely by something the Abbé Mugnier ...
- 51
5
votes
Accepted
What is the provenance of Story 6 in Day 2 of the Decameron, set against a backdrop of 13th-century Sicily?
This is what Vittore Branca explains in the Einaudi version of the Decameron (Italian original) about the antecedents of this novella:
Neppure di questa novella si possono indicare antecedenti ...
- 1,248
5
votes
Source of Milton's idea that God tilted the Earth's axis after the fall of man
The notion is that in the Garden of Eden, the original pre-Lapsarian world, there were no seasons but an eternal springtime. Then at a later date, God introduced the seasons as part of a general ...
- 558
4
votes
What is the connection between the Bleak House in Broadstairs and the one in Dickens's novel?
John Forster's 'Life of Charles Dickens' published in several editions in the early 1870s includes the useful line
We are to observe also that it is never anything complete that is thus taken from ...
- 15.8k
4
votes
Where did the name Nimitseahpah come from?
In an interview for Nightmare Magazine in April of this year, Etchemendy states that:
Nimitseahpah, by the way, is a Paiute word that is usually translated
as “God.” But the old Paiutes weren’t ...
2
votes
Tolkien character names inspired by Early Modern English
Guy Davenport claimed that Tolkien was curious about Kentucky surnames and may have used them for Hobbit surnames. In his 1979 New York Times article Hobbits in Kentucky, Davenport recalls Tolkien as ...
- 725
1
vote
Inspiration for Warren Worthington in the "X-Men"?
While I don't believe that it was ever confirmed by the writers, I have often seen people claiming that Edmond Hamilton's "He That Hath Wings" was probably the basis of the character. Along ...
- 8,232
1
vote
Was Edmund in the Narnia series loosely inspired by Edmund in King Lear?
As far as I’ve been able to find, Lewis never spoke explicitly about a connection, but as Rand al'Thor noted, others have made the same connection. David L. Johns offers a full chapter in Quakering ...
- 2,468
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