Wise Men of Gotham

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Illustration in a nursery rhyme book ( Mother Goose , 1901)
Illustration in a nursery rhyme book ( Mother Goose , 1901)

Wise Men of Gotham (analogously .: [The] smart people of Gotham) is an old nickname for the inhabitants of the village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire ( England pretended) alluding to an alleged incident in which she mental confusion to the consequential costs of a royal Avoid visiting.

Legend

Cuckoo Bush Mound is the presumed location where the Wise Men attempted to fence in a cuckoo bird. It is a 3,000 year old barrow , which was recognized as such in 1847

When King Johann Ohneland (* 1167; † 1216) intended to travel through his country, every path the king rode had to be converted into a public road. The residents of Gotham heard that he wanted to ride through their village and feared the high cost of the road. The residents therefore feigned idiocy when the royal scouts arrived . Wherever the messengers looked, they saw peasants doing the most absurd tasks. Having been informed of this, King Johann Ohneland decided to set up camp elsewhere. The “Wise Men” then boasted with the words “We ween there are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.” (“We know that more idiots pass through Gotham than remain in it.”)

In the new edition of Tenures of Land (Thomas Blount, 1618–1679), revised and published in 1874 , the meeting of the royal messengers with the Gothamers is described as follows: “[…] Some of the inhabitants tried to drown an eel in a water container; others were busy pulling carts onto a large barn to protect its wood from the sun; others rolled their cheeses down a hill so that they would find their way to Nottingham for sale and some were busy locking up a cuckoo [with fences (orig .: "hedging in")] who was sitting on a wood ". In short, they were all so preoccupied with one or the other pointless activity that convinced the king's servants that this was a village of fools, from which later the phrase "Wise Men of Gotham" or "The Fools of." Gotham ”was born.

The Wakefield Mystery Plays , a 32-part series of mystery games about Corpus Christi , originated in the English city of Wakefield in the Middle Ages , mentioned the "foles of Gotham" in the 15th century at the earliest and a collection of their jokes was made in the 16th century under the title Merrie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham, gathered together by AB of Phisicke Doctour published. The "AB" is supposed to stand for Andrew Boorde or Borde (1490? –1549), who as a traveling writer and scientist is known for many things, but possibly not for this collection of jokes.

Comparable stories

The legendary wind vane of Gotham in the village center

In addition to Gotham, there are other “centers” for particularly simple-minded citizens. The residents of Coggeshall in Essex , the "Carles" of Austwick in Yorkshire , the "Gowks" of Gordon in Berwickshire, for example, have been the subject of national ridicule. For several centuries the people of Suffolk, as well as those of Norfolk, were the targets of amusement.

In many other countries, for example, it is also a popular custom to indicate the location of the most retarded citizens. In Germany we know the adventure of Gotham from the fictional town Schilda or the landscaped Irish joke ; in the Netherlands it is the residents of the city of Kampen who are amused; in the Czech Republic it was the inhabitants of the fictional Bohemian village of Kocourkov and the Moravian village of Šimperk . Scandinavia comes up with the Swedish Täljetokar from Södertälje and the Kälkborgare from Kälkestad as well as the Danish story of the stupid inhabitants of the Mols peninsula on Jutland , while the Finns smile at the Hölmöläiset and the Bembölebor. The ancient Greeks also recognized places of nonsense in Boeotia and Kyme ; the Thracian Abdera and the early Jews Nazareth . Modern Jews, especially European Jews, amuse themselves with the old anecdotes of the Polish city of Chełm . In ancient Anatolia , Phrygia was considered a refuge for the stupid.

Kindervers

The Wise Men of Gotham is remembered in a popular children's song ( Roud Folk Song Index number 19695). The text says:

Three wise men of Gotham,
They went to sea in a bowl,
And if the bowl had been stronger
My song would have been longer.

The rhyme first appeared in Mother Goose's Melody around 1765 and in many other compilations since then.

Pop Culture

In memory of the peasant cunning events of Gotham, the satirical writer Washington Irving used the name "Gotham" for New York City (1807) in his magazine Salmagundi in 1807. This then also became an unofficial nickname for the largest US city.

Today's people are more familiar with the name from the popular comics in the Batman series. This has been around since 1939 - the hero first experienced his adventures in a nameless city (which is similar to New York) - but it was only in an episode that appeared in Detective Comics # 48 in February 1941 that the "gloomy city" was named Gotham City that has remained with her ever since. The existence of the real Gotham in Nottinghamshire was also mentioned in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight # 206 . In a story called Cityscape in Batman Chronicles # 6 , it is “revealed” that Gotham was originally built to barrack insane criminals, and Robin quotes from a journal the sentence “I even have a name for it. We could call it 'Gotham' after a village in England - where it is widely believed that everyone is mad. "

When asked about the connection between Gotham, England and New York City, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani replied that it was "a pleasure to have the opportunity to see the cultural and historical connection between the two places confirmed."

In the DC Comics series The Batman of Arkham , Joker recites the nursery rhyme "Wise Men of Gotham".

See also

literature

  • William Alexander Clouston: Book of Noodles , London 1888 ( online at Project Gutenberg )
  • Robert Hayes Cunningham: Amusing Prose Chap-books , London 1889 online at archive.org
  • Dwight Edwards Marvin: The Antiquity of Proverbs: Fifty Familiar Proverbs and Folk Sayings with Annotations and Lists of Connected Forms, Found in All Parts of the World , pp. 113–120, GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1922 ( online at archive.org)

Individual evidence

  1. Jump up ↑ Kurt Werth: Noodles, Nitwits and Numbskulls , Dell Pub Co 1979
  2. ↑ a b G. Seal, Encyclopedia of folk heroes (ABC-CLIO, 2001), pages 272-3
  3. ^ A b c Iona and Peter Opie: The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edition 1997, p. 193.
  4. ^ Thomas Blount: Tenures of Land (revised by W. Carew Hazlitt, p. 133. London, 1874). The Wise Fools of Gotham
  5. ^ Tenures of land & customs of manors, by Thomas Blount (edition from 1874) in the Google book search
  6. ^ Gerard T. Koeppel Water for Gotham: a History , Princeton University Press 2001, p. 103.
  7. ↑ Descriptio Norfolciensium about the 12th century printed in Wright's Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems .
  8. ^ Alfred Stapleton: All about the Merry Tales of Gotham , Kessinger Publishing , Whitefish (Montana) 2005, p. 10.
  9. ↑ Ebenezer Cobham Brewer: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Giving the Derivation, Source, Or Origin of Common Phrases, Allusions, and Words that Have a Tale to Tell , 1898 in the Google Book Search
  10. ^ Gillian Elias, The Tales Of THE WISE MEN Of GOTHAM (Nottinghamshire County Council 1991), ISBN 0-900943-33-5 , p. 42
  11. ↑ Mother Goose's Melody in archive.org, page 20
  12. ^ A b "The real Gotham: The village behind the Batman stories" . BBC News.
  13. ↑ Explanation of the city name in the Batman universe. Video from ARTE (Youtube channel), approx. 5 minutes, German