Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 2

You’ll remember I spoke about how each episode of Finding Manuland looks at Mana, as the energy we exchange, as a source — the function of being human; the linguistic aspect, the miracle of MN being immanent in so many words we use, and places we go, and the founder figures, and so much else beside, and as an organising focus for this journey; and the third element, the journeying element, of every Finding Manuland episode. In the last episode I brought you on a quick survey of Ireland and Britain, and now this is the Western European Corridor atlas survey.

The idea here is: I’ve got hundreds of papers and journeys to talk to you about. In each of these podcasts will be immanent those three elements — Mana, language, and journeying. These are the introductory episodes, just to give you a flavour of what is to come next.

Maing: Where the Project Got Its Name

So, the Western European Corridor. This is the drive home from Ukraine in the autumn of 2021 — or rather, the drive back to Ukraine. Now we cross the continent, and the map starts to move under us. This corridor is where the project Finding Manuland got its name. On a drive back to my diplomatic posting, just prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — I was driving back to my diplomatic posting in Dnipro, in the autumn of 2021, at the very start of a three-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre run from my home near Emain Macha in Ireland to Dnipro — I was already noticing that my route threaded through MN- and M-A-I-N-sounding place-names, when I followed the word Maing off the satnav into a village in northern France. And there it was, on the side of a shed: Manuland.

It was getting late. I photographed the shed. The next morning I doubled back and, without quite deciding to, invented the method I have used ever since. So when I go to a place on this journey, I start at the church, or somehow in the centre of a village. I don’t know what I’m looking for, why I’m there, or if I’ll find anything. And that day in Maing, I ran in ever-increasing circles out from it, around the village, up one street and down the next, until I reached the edge of town and a cobbled road — an ancient road — climbing up a hill. Off the hill sat a mound with a herdsman on it, who, when I reached him, pointed me towards Cassels, the old capital of the Menapii, the same Manannán-worshipping sea tribe, now inland in France. I set off for Cassels, and that circling, born in Maing, is the recurring shape — like a chariot wheel — the recurring shape of every journey since.

The exchange of Mana with the herdsman; a sound heard in a place-name — the language; a hand on actual ground — the journeying. All three elements were already there, in what would have been a nondescript but altogether beautiful French village I would never have stopped in. And the name, Manuland, taken off a shed.

The Main Corridor: Goethe, Herder, and the Making of a National Culture

The corridor is a string of MN-sounding names: Mons, Mainz, Frankfurt-on-Main. I stopped along it at Goethe’s house in Frankfurt — occupied by the French when Goethe was a child. And it was at that moment that the great Herder decided: we must create a national culture, a German culture. We must unite the German tribes, by finding our Shakespeare, by creating our Shakespeare, our culture. Herder wrote, as I have said in previous episodes, which you will see and we will come back to — he said, in 1777: where is our Shakespeare? We need a Shakespeare, like England has a Shakespeare, to unite around.

And Goethe — whose house was literally hosting a French occupying general, who would eat and drink and live in that house — Goethe then became Germany’s Shakespeare. And the Grimm Brothers then became the great linguists, the first of the great philologists and linguists of the Germanic languages, and collected folk tales, and looked at the language and the meanings inside them. And then, of course, Wagner, 90 years later. The tales which Tacitus had told abo