Fascinating Footnotes
Just yesterday I finished reading Sharan Newman's The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code (Berkley Books, New York, 2005). We know and enjoy Newman's writing from her outstanding series of historical mystery novels, set in medieval France, staring the fascinating Catherine LeVendeur; Newman happens to be mentioned in my own "Top Twenty Mystery Authors: 2005" list.
This present book, however, is nonfiction, Newman writing as an informative and entertaining Medieval historian. From the title it's easy enough to guess: the book is a collection of short essays about topics mentioned in Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, topics Newman explains she was repeatedly being asked to comment on so she decided to save time and write down the answers.
But my interest here is in her footnotes. I've always been fascinated by footnotes. I think, as a child, I was puzzled by how a book could be written so that a footnote was always on the correct page.0 Fortunately, I've since seen examples of footnotes not entirely contained on the subject page, including Garrison Keillor's notorious 22-page footnote in Lake Wobegon Days. They've stopped being the inscrutible mystery to me that they once were.
Still, footnotes fascinate me — and that includes endnotes, too. Anything with superscripted numbers or symbols is a magnet to my attention. I see that little character floating invitingly above the line of text and I am irresistably drawn to look at the bottom of the page, the end of the chapter, the end of the book, wherever it takes me, to see what it was that the author needed to write but felt was not quite enough part of the text to be parenthetical (in any of the several ways that parenthesis can be printed). That makes them enigmatic to me, neither-here-nor-there thoughts for which I feel an innate sympathy.
Perhaps, then, it's not surprising that the most memorable bits from Newman's book, for me, were some footnotes. Here they are.
- [endnote #3, p. 97] Aux Grenons means "with a really big mustache."1
- [endnote #9, p. 145] Catherine also laid out gardens for the Louvre and brought ballet and zabaglione to France. There are people who feel this outweighs a little massacre and are quite fond of her.2
- [footnote, p. 320] I know this is picky, but it drives me crazy. Wicca is a masculine term. Wicce is the feminine. Both were pronounced "witcha' by Saxons. People today may say it any way they like, but don't tell me that "wicka" is the original. Thank you; I feel much better now.3
———-
0When my age was still in single digits, I had many strange ideas. I probably still do, come to think of it. Anyway, once I set out to write a novel, typing it on a typewriter (personal computers not yet invented — they would have saved me much foolishness). For several pages I went to a great deal of trouble searching for just the right words to use in my sentences so that all the text would come out right justified. I thought it was quite a waste of time, but it was the way all the books were printed….
1From the essay on "Godefroi de Bouillon", this note marks a sentence from p. 94: "Godefroi was born about 1060, the second son of Eustace aux Grenons, …."
2From the essay "The Louvre", the note is at the end of this sentence on pp. 142-143: "The Grand Gallery, where the Mona Lisa now hangs, was begun by Catherine de Medici (1519–1589), queen regent [of France] in the late sixteenth century and better known for her involvement in the massacre of the French Protestants on Saint Bartholomew's day, August 24, 1572."
3This is a footnote to this sentence on p. 320: "Finally, there is the Anglo-Saxon word wicca, meaning one who casts spells."