The sky lore of European countries is largely lost– the names for stars, the beliefs and stories about them, passed down by the folk, mostly rural. It was obliterated, literally, by literature: replaced, as countries industrialized and urbanized in the 19th century, by the scholarly system now familiar to us, derived from Greek and Latin writings.
There is one exception: Romania.
This is because Ion Otescu (1859-1932), a mathematician and educator, spent twelve years collecting such lore. Inspired by stories he remembered his mother telling him in his childhood, he got teachers and priests in 42 places around the country to send him details from their own villages and districts.
Map of Romania, showing the counties in which Otescu had informants. Gray indicates uplands, mainly the Carpathian mountain range.
From this mass of evidence he compiled his book, published in 1907 (and I’m going to have to omit the diacritic marks on Romanian words): Credintele taramului roman despre cer si stele, “Beliefs of Romanian Peasants about Stars and Sky.”
A remarkable book, pioneering and thorough. But it gained no attention, until 1990, when Danut Ionescu rediscovered it and, with Erika Lucia Suhay and Monica Ciobanu, described it in a Romanian astronomy magazine. Around the same time, Alastair McBeath made contact with members of the Romanian meteor society, meeting them later at conferences of the International Meteor Organization (IMO) in Germany and Serbia.
Alastair – who for me is a dear friend though I’ve met him only once – lives near the weather-beaten northeast coast of England, yet achieves many night-sky observations. He is expert on meteor showers, a former leader of the IMO. A not-unrelated field in which he has an interest is dragon lore, and wider ancient mythology. He contributed the “Meteors” section for 23 issues of my Astronomical Calendar, and I rely on him for advice about meteors and more.
The Romanian amateurs welcomed Alastair warmly; he was moved by their enthusiasm for meteors, astromythology, dragons, poetry. In 1995 he and his friend Andrei Dorian Gheorghe undertook the translation of Otescu’s book into English.
It was a task almost as massive as Otescu’s. You’ll see why when you see the book, with its many components. Essentially they had to build as foundation another edition of the Romanian, smoother and clearer, verifying statements, bringing remarks from footnotes into the main text. There being then no e-mail, their intricate correspondence had to be on paper; Andrei even had to use handwriting, and to decipher Romanian dialect words from a photocopy, partial and poor-quality, of Otescu’s book.
They aimed to have a version ready by 1997, the 90th anniversary of the original publication; and did, but a print publisher could not be found. An online, revised version was issued in Romania in time for the 2009 International Year of Astronomy (four centuries from Galileo’s telescope). And there things were left, as personal circumstances changed, making further work impractical.
Now at last they can be “delighted,” more genuinely than when that cliché is used in so many announcements. Romanian Star and Sky Lore is available in three forms, two of which you can find on Amazon: a Kindle e-book and a print-on-demand book.
The third, a printed book with all-sky star map much larger because it is of the fold-out kind, is available from the publisher’s website, www.astromix.ro, but it has to be purchased with Romanian currency (lei).
The star stories collected in the late 19th century could, because of the age of some of the “peasants” – farm workers and shepherds – who told them, date back to their grandparents in the 18th century. And conceivably, as Alastair and Andrei point out, if Otescu’s original papers were to come to light, there might be evidence of evem more remote date, to the Roman province of Dacia, or the kingdom of the Dacians that preceded the conquest by Roman emperor Trajan in 106 AD, as Otescu himself suggested.
One of the sky maps in the book. Folk constellations (solid lines) coincide with only parts of the classical ones (dashed lines).
Romanian is, as its name makes obvious, one of the Romance languages, the descendants of Latin. But those of us who have some familiarity with its sisters such as Italian or French tend to know little about it. So, to me, the book is a treasure trail not only of stories but of little linguistic revelations.
For “the,” French and the others stick “le,” or other forms from Latin “ille,” before a word; Romanian sticks “-ul” after it. The Big Dipper is Carul Mare, “chariot-the big,” and the four stars of its pan are Roatele Carului, “wheels of the chariot.” And the “of” ending, -ui, stuck on after the -ul, could that even be a trace of the time when this region was under the rule of the Turks and and might have borrowed habits from their “agglutinating” language?
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Dear Guy,
Thank you for the kind words, and the kind mention of our Slavic book! Yes, I can tell you something about the Balkan neighbors of the Slavic languages, but for the real last word on them (25 years in the gestation), look for another Cambridge book, The Balkan Languages, by Victor A. Friedman, University of Chicago, and Brian D. Joseph, Ohio State University. Cambridge University Press. Expected publication date: January 2025. Will be open access.
Re lunar standstills. Soon moon ascending node will be at RA 0h so when at 6h centre of moon will be 5.15 degrees north of ecliptic as seen from equator. But moon is 0.5 degrees across then add another degree for parallax and from South pole limb of moon will be 6.65 degrees N of ecliptic or a tad over 30 degrees N declination.So for the months nearing node at 0h the moon rises more to the north when at 6h RA position but this northward progression slows as node nears. Then whole process reversed after node. Pic on Spaceweather a few days ago of the 2006 phenomenon. The process is much like the suns rising and setting azimuths around the solstices. So Guy can you post the date of lunar ascending node being 0 hours?
This is what I describe as “flat” and “hilly” years for the moon and show with an illustration on page 88 of Astronomical Calendar 2024. 2025 will be one of the years most hilly, with the moon’s path reaching farthest north and south of the north and south extremes of the ecliptic.
Tried to insert a screenshot, but I don’t think it worked.
I watched online broadcasts from Stonehenge and Calanais, both were clouded out but had interesting background commentary, and then from Griffith Observatory in LA with Ed Krupp. https://www.space.com/1st-lunar-standstill-in-18-years-about-to-occur-how-to-see-it They describe 2024-25 as standstill season. Lunar alignments are also claimed for Ohio’s Octagon Earthworks but apparently no events were planned, that I learned of in any case. We always benefit from your lucid commentary and art.
Dave Ross
N. Canton, OH
What a rare treasure! One is grateful for the huge amount of labor behind it.
Hired a Dacia Duster 4WD in Iceland. Now I know a bit more about the name Dacia. Thanks for the learned comments above.
Yes, adding my thanks for the post on Otescu’s book! I saw some of this material, I think, made available during the IYA some years back. A relative from Romania who now lives in the UK is having a friend bring copies for both her and myself when she visits next month! I will soon have it in hand!
Say, is anything forthcoming on the lunar standstills of 2024-25, or did I miss something? There was a bit of discussion on Hastro-L today.
Warm regards and best wishes!
Dave Ross
N. Canton, OH
Thanks, David, but can you explain what you mean by “the lunar standstills of 2024-25,”?
As a follow up, a good and dear friend of mine shares with me the heavens in the language of the Odawa
What a goldmine of fascinating information you bring forth. I leapt from these words to and hour and a half of poking around Romanian history. Thank you.
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing.
Lucky Romanians! I went to a talk a few years ago in my local library about Irish folklore and the speaker from West Kerry mentioned that most of the night sky lore had been lost. Be that as it may, the Irish Folklore Commission gathered vast quantities of material in the 1930s including this:
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5008881/4963331/5087059
Dear Guy,
Thank you so much for telling us about Otescu and his work! I had no idea. Let’s see if his title comes across with the proper marks under the t and s and over the a:
“Credințele țăranului român despre cer și stele”
It’s actually ‘The beliefs of the Romanian peasant about sky and stars’.
When you say ‘derived from Greek and Latin writings’, you might want to add ‘derived from Greek, Latin and Arabic writings’. Think of Rigel and Deneb and all the star names that begin with Al-.
I don’t think you can blame the Romaniann ‘of’/’to’ ending -ui on the Turks. It goes straight back to Latin. My old Cornell colleagues Ti Alkire and Carol Rosen, in their charmingly-written book Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction, show how the pronoun ille ‘that one, he’ had the masculine dative case form illi in Classical Latin, but under the influence of the dative case of qui ‘who’, which was cui, came to have the dative case form illui in spoken Latin. (They take examples from graffiti and other preserved bits of spoken Latin.) Romanian, like some of its neighbor languages in the Balkan area, merged its old dative and its old genitive case, so -ui covers both.
When modern Romanian says carului ‘of the chariot’, the parts of that are car- going back to Latin carr-, -u- going back to the Latin masculine ending -us on carrus, -l- going back to the pronoun ille, and -ui going back to the dative case ending on illui.
A special thing to know about the Turks is that their language has vowel harmony. If there is an -u- vowel in a word, other vowels have to change to suit it. If there is an -i- vowel, other vowels have to adapt to fit that. So you’d never have an -u- and an -i- next to each other.
Wayles is a professor at Cornell (he has just now published, with co-author Danko Šipka, a major book, The Cambridge Handbook of Slavic Linguistics), besudes being an indefatigable campaigner for human rights, and I was pretty sure he would be able to enlighten us on the non-Slavic Languages of the Balkans also.
I dropped “Arabic” from my list on reflecting, too hastily, that many of the medieval Arabic sources were translations from Greek, such as the Almagest. But others were not.
I know about Turkish vowel harmony, but thought it possible that the Romanian -ui was a sort of approximation to the Turkish vowel that is like u without lip-rounding.