Charles and N-Lsters:
Thank you for the fascinating comments about Kinbote’s Disa and the Wikipedia reference to Disa “the heroine of a Swedish legendary saga…believed to be from the Middle Ages….” At the bottom of that web page I found a link to Uggleupplagan (what a wonderful Zemblan-sounding word!), “The Owl Edition,” the second edition (published 1904-1926 in 38 vols.), of the “Nordic Family Book,” known in Swedish as Nordisk familjebok. I was struck by the “bok” in the title of this popular encyclopedia, about which Nabokov could have known. Following the link leads to the logo of The Owl Edition. Please have a look—could the logo be something like a sirin, the owl from which Nabokov took his nom de plume when starting out as a Russian writer in Berlin? In Nabokov’s favorite Russian dictionary, that of Vladimir Dal’, “sirin” is described as a “filin” or eagle owl, and further as “a long-tailed owl similar to a hawk—flies day and night.”
Could “Disa” be another instance of Nabokov transitorily, Alfred Hitchcock-like, peeking out from within PF and winking at the reader to say “I’m really behind Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s commentary”?
Jerry Katsell
-----Original Message-----
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
[mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf
Of Chaswe@AOL.COM
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2007
2:22 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] darker
thoughts on Disa in PF
Since I was obviously mistaken in my earlier disbelief of a Swedish Queen Disa, I trawled the net again and found a Wikipedia reference to both her and to Messenius. here;
and here:
I apologise to Priscilla for not having trawled energetically enough in my previous post: it is easier to hit a button than to rummage through one's bookshelves, but I was being sloppy and idle.
However, I have now looked through two or three dictionaries of Scandinavian mythology, and Queen Disa doesn't figure, unlike the rather vague disir who flit about, somewhat moth and butterfly-like. Messenius's source for his play remains obscure (perhaps Dieter can supply chapter and verse). Queen Disa is about as legendary as is possible. I thought the suggestion that Disa is the Great Mother-Goddess equivalent of Isis rather interesting, but she clearly has little or nothing to do with Kinbote's Disa. I don't see her as sinister, though, except in the sense that the womb was also thought of as the tomb in those far-off, distant times.
Charles
In a message dated 05/12/2007 20:18:46 GMT Standard Time, chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET writes:
from Carolyn Kunin to
Dear Dieter Zimmer,
I think I did know that Disa referred to both butterfly and orchid, but the Uppsala Swedish link is new to me and I'm sure to all of us. What strikes me as interesting is that your legendary Queen Disa seems to have a dark side as dis-turbing as her bright side is more fairy-tale than mythological. She rather reminds me of Stalin sparing some by sending them off to starve to death in cold dark places (there's a new biography out of the young Stalin that shows he too had his bright side).
I have also felt a rather infernal something about the name Disa, hazily supposing it to be from the Aeneid, so being lazy I googled up the name and here is what I found on Wikipedia:
Religion, mythology, and fiction
· Dis, the fictional city in The Divine Comedy that contains the lower circles of hell also an alternate name for Lucifer in the same work
· Dis Pater, predecessor of Pluto in Roman Mythology and ancestor of the Gauls according to Roman thought
· Dís, singular of dísir, a group of minor goddesses in Norse mythology
· Pluto, as the alternative name "Dïs"
· Dís (Middle-earth), a female Dwarf from J. R. R. Tolkien's universe
I think we can safely dis-miss the female Dwarf, but can our highly cultured VN with his Can' Grande ancestry not have been aware of the Dantesque meaning and other Pluto-esque meaning of Dis? It could be dis-missable I suppose were it not for the similar name of her husband - - hades/shade.
Can this really not be of any importance?
Carolyn
On Dec 5, 2007, at 9:11 AM, NABOKV-L wrote:
[EDNOTE. Unfortunately, Dieter Zimmer's illuminating post, printed below, was purloined (as they say) by the listserv when originally sent. We have now straightened out the problem and wish to thank Dieter for his patience. -- SES]
Von: "Dieter E. Zimmer" <post@dezimmer.net>
An: "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Betreff: Disa in PF
Datum: Mittwoch, 21. November 2007 14:27
Dear Editors,
as the message I sent nabokv-l last weekend has not been posted so far, and as there have been further comments in this thread, I am sending you my e-mail once more. Please do send it out. It may really help to clarify an issue that has puzzled many.
Best, Dieter Zimmer, Berlin
21 Nov 2007 - 2pm
****************************************************
As concerns the name 'Disa,' I am making an altogether different suggestion in my notes to 'Pale Fire' (in press), anticipated in my 'Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths' (2001).
To make a long story short: 'Disa' is the scientific name of both a butterfly and an orchid, Erebia disa (Thunberg, 1791) and Disa uniflora (Bergius, 1767). The insect and the flower were named by two Swedish or more precisely Uppsala naturalists who with this choice of name independently honored a mythical figure of local renown, Queen Disa of Uppsala in Svealand, the title character of the first Swedish play, by Messenius, for a time annually performed by Uppsala students. Kinbote may have been oblivious to this derivation, but Nabokov certainly was not. There is a strong hint in 'Pale Fire' that 'Disa' is indeed a reference to that Scandinavian butterfly: the next entry in Kinbote's index is 'Embla,' a Zemblan town, and that is another figure of Scandinavian mythology (the first woman) as well as another Erebia butterfly, also named by Thunberg in the same year and closely related to Erebia disa; their habitat overlaps.
There even is a special point to the reference to Queen Disa which nobody so far seems to have noticed. Disa was famous as a clever and good queen. Her fame rested mainly on a piece of advice she had given the king. In fact it
had seemed so ingenious to him that it made him marry her though she was only a village mayor's daughter. During a time of desperate famine, an Uppsala "thing" had decided to have the old and the sick killed. Disa suggested a
way to to avoid this severe measure: instead of killing them, to send them away to Norrland (the north of today's Sweden). Her advice was accepted, parts of the population were deported to Norrland, and the chances of those
remaining to survive the famine were again on the rise.
Now if this ever happened in reality, the chances of the old and sick to survive in wild, cold and dark Norrland would have been very small, and sending them there would have been just another way of sentencing them to death. But not if in the place of Norrland there would have been kindly Zembla, as Kinbote's tales suggest! In this case everybody might have survived, the deportees would have become Zembla's first settlers, and clever Queen Disa would have been a kind of founding patron of this country.
Dieter E. Zimmer, Berlin