Tuesday, October 22, 2013

ASGW Sleepy Hollow (episode 5 - now with screenshots!)


so i was really looking forward to watching sleepy hollow last night and letting my brain turn to mush after a second PhD open house in less than a week.  but it was a rerun of the pilot, bah.

on the other hand, this gives me the chance to catch the blog up since i missed episode 5 last week.

there wasn't really any theology in ep 5, but there was a ton of awful history.  so here we go!

well, ok, first up: the horseman of pestilence.  also conquest because that actually follows the text of Revelation 6.  but why is he dressed as a samurai?
sleepy hollow pestilence as samurai

But, the major problem in this episode was historical:  a kid from the colony of Roanoke speaks Middle English. 

um.  no.

as wikipedia helpfully points out, Roanoke was a colony in North Carolina, founded in 1585 and disappeared sometime after the first recorded birth in the colony in 1587.

Middle English started to fade away in 1470.  it was replaced (again, wikipedia) by a dialect from London.  so the colony of Roanoke was founded slightly over 100 years after Middle English started to die out.  Also, let's please note that most of the colonists came from London or the south of England and so were closer to the linguistic shift and even less likely to still speak Middle English.  not only that, but the 1580s were well into the Great Vowel Shift, especially in the south, making Middle English even less likely.

further, Ichabod Crane is an Oxford history professor in this telling (in the original, he's just a schoolmaster).  the chances of a history professor being fluent in Middle English by the late 18th century are slim to none.

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