"The Children of the Pool" by Arthur Machen

1 year ago
10

Lanypwll Farm is definitely a made up locale. Indeed, it's not even obvious that Lanypwll is a valid Welsh word, at least not by modern orthography. Now Glanypwll, on the other hand, is a Welsh word meaning riverside. One can only suppose Machen meant Glanypwll, given he says in the text 'by the pool', so very similar meaning, but for whatever reason his orthography a century ago didn't include the 'g'. Or maybe it was Glanypwll a century ago and Machen changed it slightly so nobody would confuse his story locale for a real place. Anyways, I tried my best on the pronunciation, but sure it's pretty terrible. Those uniquely Welsh phonemes are not easy for me.

Bishop Butler is also invoked in Machen's story "The Islington Mystery", but to the exact opposite effect. HA! I did a recording of that story a few weeks ago, if you want to give it a listen.

Not being British, I wasn't sure if there was some abbreviated way to say "£3 5s" out loud. I know if it is just shillings and pence there is, but no idea if there is any convention when pounds are involved.

togs: slang term for clothes. Sounds kind of weird to apply it to an Archbishop's attire...

Cricklewood-Kilburn-Brondesbury: an area of London a few miles northwest of Regent's Park (and Abbey Road).

"Principles of Gestalt Psychology" is a real book! By one Kurt Koffka! Originally published in 1935. This story was published in 1936, so at the time Machen was writing this story, that book would have been bleeding-edge psychology.

Regarding Poe and landscape gardening, you can discover the meaning of this through Poe's story "The Domain of Arnheim". I did a recording of it myself that you can find here on my channel.

The picture used is "evil swamp" by pendrachken, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

To follow along: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606961h.html

As this story goes along, we're all fulling expect it to be some satisfyingly weird tale, but then instead it goes off and become the anti-weird tale. Boo! Well, gotta keep us on our toes, I guess.

I feel like my voice is a bit stuffed up in this recording. I'm not sick, but rather the air conditioner has started to kick on the past day or two, and the first couple of days of use tend to be a bit rough on the sinuses.

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