Talk:Ethelred the Unready
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OK, so why was he called "The Uncounselled", then? Bad habit of holding his hands over his ears and singing "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean" when his advisors spoke? -- Paul Drye
- Not a million miles away from what happened, as it transpires... Except his advisors were as twisty as a New Labour focus group.... sjc
According to [1], it means "unwise". -- DrBob
- - and if you believe much of that particular take on history, you'll also believe that England is a South Sea island paradise where the trains run on time and the streets are paved with gold. sjc
There are potentially n different translations out there, and n-1 of them are historically inaccurate if not actually wrong from a linguistic point of view. However, and I was hoping not to have to go into this, it's actually a longer article than most in the Wikipedia in itself, the word in AS is unraede, "without counsel" meaning that (to paraphrase Monty Python) in the ultimate balance, when all was said and done, at the final whistle, at a time of major national crisis he had absolutely no answers whatsoever for the problems which confronted him, and, moreover, as those who gave hime the nickname would have been fully aware, nobody on which he could rely to turn to for those answers. It is an Anglo-Saxon form of joke, an ironic pun, and is a) exceptionally cruel and b) searingly accurate. It doesn't just mean he was unprepared, it means he didn't have a fecking clue.
- In fact it is not an Anglo-Saxon joke - the epithet unraede is of uncertain provenance and first appears in the Middle English period. A pun certainly, but not one likely to have been coined by his contemporary.
PS: DrBob: you don't think that the chinless wonders might be being somewhat diplomatic about their forebears in their website do you, by any chance?sjc
mmmmm, royal nomenclature. My favorite English mistranslation is Philip the Fair of France. He's Philip-the-Goodlooking-who-EVERYONE-hated. Traditional nomenclature is a snare and a delusion, but how else are we going to keep Ethelred the U. separate from the other Ethelred(s)? --MichaelTinkler
My sentiments entirely. I was going to bang him in as Ethelred II but no-one would have the foggiest who Ethelred II was (I had to figure it myself). sjc
- Go Cognomina! Unless anyone writes an article on "England's Rose," in which case I'll have to rethink! JHK
Best def I've seen is "poorly advised", tho I doubt "unready" will unstick... Trekphiler 11:04, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Cleanup tag
Adraeus, what is it about the article that needs to be cleaned up? Adam Bishop 8 July 2005 15:13 (UTC)
- Minor issues: organize the article into sections, convert non-English letterforms into HTML entities. For exampel, Æ. See also: Manual of Style for Biographies. Adraeus July 8, 2005 20:48 (UTC)
- Well it's not really long enough to have sections yet. And if you know how to convert those letters into HTML entities, please do - surely that would have been easier than slapping a cleanup tag on it and discussing it here :) Adam Bishop 8 July 2005 21:27 (UTC)
Well it's cleaned up now, I hope. Adam Bishop 20:21, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
The hypelink for first wife is incorrect; currently points to wife of Canute
[edit] Start Class
Good work on a basic outline of his life, but the article is mostly unsourced and could certainly contain more details in most facets of his life. Perhaps most lacking is any discussion of where "Unready" came from. Even though the translation of "Unraede" is in question, there should still be some decsription of the term and why he was not, in fact, Unready. —Cuiviénen 15:09, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
