NPPF Bera Range
Jasper Fidget
fakename at verizon.net
Thu Sep 18 09:17:35 CDT 2003
What's going on with the PF read? Am I the only one left? Already?
p. 137
"The Bera Range"
Kinbote describes "a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains," a
Zemblan mirror of the Appalachian Mountains.
The word "bear" comes from the Old English "bera": "[Old English bera =
Middle Dutch bere (Dutch beer), Old High German bero (German Bär), from West
Germanic: rel. to Old Norse bjœrn.]" (OED)
Bera Mawr ("Big Bera", 2605 ft.) and Bera Bach ("Little Bera", 2648 ft.) are
two mountains in the Carneddau range of northern Wales, part of Snowdonia,
and near Afon Goch river and Aber Falls (two names that resonate slightly
elsewhere in PF). Big Bera happens to be shorter than Little Bera; they
were probably named this way because Big Bera is more impressive to look at.
http://www.crux.u-net.com/tables/Wales/Carneddau.html
http://www.wherekillarney.com/bera.html
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/simon.edwardes/index.htm
http://www.britainexpress.com/wales/tour/
Try as I might I could not coax Charles II of England into crossing the
Carneddau mountains; instead he stopped short of the Severn and returned
east. Neither could I rearrange geography so that crossing them would lead
into the Wye Valley -- they are in the Northwest part of Wales, while the
Wye is in the Southeast. (I wonder if VN encountered similar frustrations
in researching his book?)
So why the "Bera" mountains instead of, for example, the Black Mountains,
which do border the Wye?
There's a Bera (Beara) Peninsula in Ireland, one of several peninsulas in
the southwest that extend into the Atlantic like fingers pointing across the
ocean, and which is divided down the spine by the Caha Mountains and cut off
basally from the mainland by the Kenmare River. (And no, neither "Bera" nor
"Beara" turns up in Joyce as far as I can discover.)
http://www.carn.com/Bearaindex.htm
I thought maybe Bera was intended to suggest Lavrenti Beria (1899-1953),
Stalin's boss of the Soviet NKVD (Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs,
a domestic secret police before the KGB), believed responsible for the
deaths of millions of Russians in the purges, and later imprisoned and
executed by Krushchev.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSberia.htm
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/russia/kgb/index.html
"Bera" is also a language used in the Congo.
http://www.language-museum.com/b/bera.htm
(This site is great by the way -- it provides examples from 2000 different
languages.)
Tasik Bera is the largest natural freshwater lake in Peninsula Malaysia.
http://www.marimari.com/content/malaysia/popular_places/lakes/bera/bera.html
None of which is very compelling.
The geographical features described in this passage do seem to allude to the
real Novaya Zemlya, with its chain of rugged mountains (an extension of the
Urals) and its impassable canal (the Matochkin Strait that divides the two
islands). To the west is the Barents Sea, so another formulation of Bera I
suppose....
Jasper Fidget
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