As we all know, one of the problems of posting our work publicly is it can be taken by others and presented as their own work. In a post about Hugin and Munin, Dark Raven has incorporated my own musings on Odin’s two ravens as a mythic representation of the interconnection of thought and memory as understood in medieval memory theory verbatim and without citation.
A Google Alert drew my attention to the use of machina memorialis in relation to Hugin and Munin, and at first I thought, “cool, someone’s citing me, I want to see what they’re saying.” Quite disappointed to find that they’re not saying anything new. Dark Raven’s added an introduction to who the ravens are, the relevant passage from “Grímnismál” as well as the passage from Snorri’s Edda that I included, added some cool images, and reversed the order of my two paragraphs. The plagiarized passages from Dark Raven’s blog read as such:
This legend is at least as old as the 13th Century when Snorri wrote the Prose Edda. We also find reference to the ravens in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius, the manuscript which contains the peom “Grímnismál,” “Grimnir’s Sayings.” We know, however, that the Codex Regius is a copy of another manuscript and it is believed many of the poems are much older than the thirteenth-century manuscript date. Likewise, exactly how far back Hugin and Munin date is unclear, but images of Odin and his two ravens are found in art dating to the Migration Period (ca. 400 – 600 CE).
In these two ravens I see a mythic representation of the connection between thought and memory. Our ability to think allows us to access and make use of our memories. And our memories, whether they are naturally or artificially stored, represent that which we know, what we call knowledge. Just as Hugin and Munin are separate but closely related entities, thought and memory are discrete but connected cognitive functions.Thought allows us to make use of our memories by means of reminiscentia, while at the same time our memories serve as a machina memorialis, as the engine of thought. Thought and memory being knowledge, must be shared, just as the ravens shared there knowledge with Odin.
The passages, from my web site, read thusly:
In these two ravens I see a mythic representation of the connection between thought and memory. Our ability to think allows us to access and make use of our memories. And our memories, whether they are naturally or artificially stored, represent that which we know, what we call knowledge. Just as Hugin and Munin are separate but closely related entities, thought and memory are discrete but connected cognitive functions.Thought allows us to make use of our memories by means of reminiscentia, while at the same time our memories serve as a machina memorialis, as the engine of thought.
This legend is at least as old as the 13th Century when Snorri wrote the Prose Edda. We also find reference to the ravens in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius, the manuscript which contains the peom “Grímnismál,” “Grimnir’s Sayings.” We know, however, that the Codex Regius is a copy of another manuscript and it is believed many of the poems are much older than the thirteenth-century manuscript date. Likewise, exactly how far back Hugin and Munin date is unclear, but images of Odin and his two ravens are found in art dating to the Migration Period (ca. 400 – 600 CE).
Dark Raven hasn’t even bothered to fix my typos.
For the record, I don’t mind finding my words on someone else’s blog. Hell, some of my blog posts are little more than someone else’s words. Blogs can and do function as commonplace books. It’s the link, the acknowledgement, that I’d like to see.