So, it’s Autumn 2020 and the question is… is there yet any immersive ‘Google Street View’ VR headset for the impoverished historian and topographer, at under £300 and with good visual resolution?

The latest edition of the UK’s venerable PC Pro magazine triggered my interest in this question, with a review of a £300 VR unit called the Oculus Quest 2. Apparently it’s rather good, 1920px per-eye at a 90hz refresh-rate, £299 and just starting to ship now.

Looks good, so the deal-breaker question is… can it run Street View? It’s a difficult question to answer via search. You would think that everyone and their dog would have a neat Web page listing VR kit that works with Google Street View in 2020.

Turns out that my question was formulated wrongly, due to me being totally clueless about VR. Oculus effectively has its own app ‘wrapper’ for Street View and it’s called Wander and sells for £8. This app lists as being compatible with the Oculus Quest, so will presumably also be compatible with Oculus Quest 2. The reviews of the late-2018 app suggest the app was a bit dodgy until the end of summer 2020, when it had updates which fixed a lot of the complaints.

But Will Hart at CthulhuWho1 provides a vital snippet of information about the budget Oculus Go as a Wander-capable sub-£300 option…

“The Oculus Go does require a Wi-Fi connection, and the one-time use of a smartphone to get it connected at first”

So, while it appears the Oculus Go can currently be had for £150 from Argos in the UK, and less if you’re willing to risk eBay, the smartphone activation is a deal-breaker if you don’t actually own a smartphone. I assume that the “smartphone activation” may also be the case with the Oculus Quest 2 too.

This vital information then led me to discover that the Go and the Quest are just the wrong headsets, as…

“Oculus Rift S is meant to work with a desktop PC, connected through a dual USB 3.0 and DisplayPort cable, the Oculus Quest is completely wireless.”

Right, so that’s the solution. What I actually need is an Oculus Rift S + desktop PC + the cables. Which would actually be powerful enough to run not Wander, but rather the full Google Earth VR on Oculus Rift. Google Earth VR added Street View at the end of 2017, and is free rather than £8. It’s perhaps also more likely to continue working in the long-term.

Additionally, when I go back to the PC Pro review I learn that…

With Oculus killing off the Rift S (£399) in the coming months, the Quest 2 really is in a league of its own.

Thus the answer to the “£300?” question appears to be: wait until the Oculus Rift S can be had for £250, perhaps as a ‘discontinued hardware’ bargain in the New Year sales for 2020/21? One should be able to use it with the full Google Earth VR app and a desktop PC, given a USB 3.0 port and possibly a DisplayPort splitter cable. The risk there is that cheap Oculus Rift S’s don’t actually flood the market in a few months time, but keep their price and gradually become expensive eBay rarities for VR headset-collectors.

The other possibility is that Oculus manages to get the Oculus Quest 2 to offer a one-time activation option via an Android tablet such as the popular Kindle Fire, rather than a smartphone. But I guess one of their aims may be to harvest the phone-numbers, which they couldn’t do from tablets. Also, it would mean Facebook interfacing with an Amazon device.

Until then, it seems that the impoverished topographer has to carry on using Google Earth while nudging his nose into a widescreen desktop monitor… for free.

Update, May 2021: the Oculus Rift S never went into the bargain sales. But there are now big 34″ curved monitors priced below £500 inc. VAT. These are meant for videogamers but could be a viable StreetView alternative for many older desktop users who don’t want the VR games and want to use normal spectacles etc.

Grognardia surveys The Covers of The Lord of the Rings in the U.S. paperbacks. From the perspective of the UK I don’t recognise any of these, but they probably mean a lot to American readers. But they’re interesting, as I’d never seen the covers for Donald A. Wollheim’s pirated Ace Books paperbacks. The American paperback covers get noticeably worse over the years, with the Barbara Remington / Ballantine covers being the best in a sort of Moomintroll-ish way — though rather puzzling as to what they actually show…

A new 2020 M.A. dissertation reconsiders the discounted idea of a monastic authorship for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in “Revelations in the Green Chapel: The Gawain-poet as Monastic Author”. It is online in open access.

The case for monastic authorship is not at all proven, but the dissertation’s discussion still makes for interesting reading. The author draws on Philip F. O’Mara (1992) who proposed that one Robert Holcot could have been a possible tutor for the young Gawain-poet. This is compatible with the timeline in my recent book and indeed fits it quite nicely. O’Mara’s short article looked at themes and symbolism and suggested that the Gawain-poet clearly…

“knew the Moralitates [by Holcot], and perhaps Holcot’s more professional works.”

O’Mara then makes a leap. He suggests that, to know Holcot’s work and his thinking, the Gawain-poet likely had some personal tuition under Holcot…

“If he was born between about 1310 and 1330 [he may have become, personally] “Holcot’s student (perhaps informally) … more probably at Northampton [re:] Holcot’s work in Northampton in his last years.”

The dates do match mine very well. Robert Holcot left the service of the rather liberal-sounding Bishop of Durham in 1342, and after (perhaps, maybe) a series of winter lectures at Cambridge Holcot was assigned c. 1343 to serve with a Dominican religious house in Northampton. These dates would be a perfect fit for a then 16-18 year-old Gawain-poet, boarded with a suitable lesser house and educated locally when young as was the custom (Swythamley, in relation to Alton?), but then in need of some further tuition and polishing for a year or so. The intellectual dispositions of both the Bishop of Durham and Holcot also fit very well with the concerns and approaches of Gawain.

There is the question, though, of to what extent Moralitates was “published” in 1340. And, if then widely distributed and digested by c. 1342, could it then have been taken up for use in teaching by other personal tutors and abbots of the time? But perhaps the most likely explanation is simply that the Gawain-poet closely read and absorbed Holcot’s works at some time between 1342 and 1376.

I’m pleased to see the makers of old-school The Midderlands RPG have nearly fully-funded their Kickstarter, and in just a few days.

The game is set in a gritty fantasy-comedy-horror late-medieval West Midlands. It has my unofficial Stoke-on-Trent expansion and I see there’s also a new September 2020 “Chewer of Fingers” introductory Midderlands game set in “Staffershire”, specifically in the bogs along the river Pegridge (Penkridge) north of Wolfhorton (Wolverhampton).

A couple of new issues of the Midderzine fanzine have appeared since I last looked, Midderzine #4 and Midderzine #5. #4 has an interesting new character-class: Serpentist, and #5 has another “Staffershire” location detailed, “Abbots Bream: A merchant’s town in Staffershire” and “The Town Market: An Abbots Bream market complete with stalls.” (Abbots Bromley).

All in all, the game appears to be expanding quite nicely into mid Staffordshire, with the option to make an unofficial trek up the new earliest canals into the fledgling early-industrial Potteries in North Staffordshire. Once there, slipping past the Clay Guard and stowing away on one of the pottery canal barges there would offer a natural way for your party of adventurers to reach ‘The City of Great Lunden’ which has its own Midderlands book.

The game’s £7k of Kickstarter funding will now bring this table-top RPG to the fifth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons rules (“5e D&D”, popular, but perhaps no longer an ideal-fit in terms of its new-found politically correctness). It currently runs on the free Swords & Wizardry tabletop RPG system. The Kickstarter looks set to go far beyond its base £7k though, in terms of hitting expansion goals.

As we head toward The Swedish History Museum’s massive door-buster exhibition on the Vikings (set to open early 2021, when last heard of), there are reviews of two recent books on the topic. The Silver Key reviews Tom Shippey’s Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings, in which Shippey rebuts the ‘shy, sensitive antiques dealers’ image of the Vikings that is currently purveyed by academics…

I didn’t realize the extent to which this re-evaluation of the Viking character was working overtime in the halls of academia. Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (2018, Reaktion Books) is Shippey’s semi-bombastic rebuttal to the revisionists and whitewashers. It’s not that Vikings weren’t also great traders, or slowly shifted from raiders and slave-takers to land-owners and eventually settlers, but Saga literature and even the archaeological record paints a picture of savagery and warrior ethos that can’t be so easily explained away.

The Russell Kirk Center reviews How the Vikings Saw Themselves, which takes more of a hard archaeological and ‘material culture’ view, also informed by the latest research on the religious practices…

“Price, a professor of archaeology at Uppsala University in Sweden, has added a simultaneously authoritative and accessible account to the rapidly growing and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Vikings. … Through the Vikings’ material culture, he discovers a civilisation thoroughly invested in the stabilising force of monarchical rule. Despite the Vikings’ pursuit of power abroad, they had a firm sense of tradition and stability within their own realms. … It builds on his innovative work in The Viking Way (2002), which delves in great scholarly detail into the spiritual lives of the Old Norse speaking peoples.”

The old “Blue Bell” bottle kiln, Stoke-on-Trent, by Harry Smith. A blurry eBay image, so not representative of his fine ink-work. This popped up on eBay and had this usefully complete biography stuck on the back…

A little riffle through the Potteries Auction website also found these…

He also did some footballing portraits and some Second World War aviation pictures, reflecting his time serving with the ‘Dam Busters’ RAF Squadron. Likely to have been most active in the 1960s and 70s in the Potteries.

Evidently his prints have come up for local auction over the last 18 months or so, and may now be starting to filter onto eBay. One hopes that the best of the originals have been given to local museums for safe-keeping.

Staffordshire has 65 peaks over 1,000 feet high. Who knew? Jeff Kent, of Stone Ramblers knew, and he wrote the book on them… Staffordshire’s 1,000 foot Peaks.

A faun illustration from 1938, from the cover of a booklet for a celebrity concert visit to Stoke-on-Trent.

Arnold Bennett, “The People of the Potteries” from Cassell’s Family Magazine, January 1911.

arnold_bennett_people_potteries_1911.pdf

Arnold Bennett’s masterpiece “The Death of Simon Fuge” is now available as a public-domain two-hour audiobook read by David Wales, in Librivox’s new release of The Grim Smile Of The Five Towns.

It’s a pretty good lively reading with some subdued attempt at dialogue characterisation, read by an older man with what is probably a New England American accent. He goes at it rather fast, and is a little sibilant when heard on headphones. But the graphic equaliser and real-time speed-shifter of a good audio player (such as AIMP) will fix that…

Speed: 0.94 or 0.95.

EQ settings to start tweaking from:

Sadly there’s not a single illustration for “Fuge” to be had, but this picture from North Staffordshire in circa 1902-03 gets pretty near to the three main male characters, with the visitor Mr. Loring being the one standing behind and with a pipe…

Part of an interview with an old man of Mow Cop, published in a booklet on A Short History of Mow Cop in 1907 (aka Mow Cop and its Slopes: A Short History). It’s a £10 eBay listing and I can’t get more of it.

The author obviously had the gumption, which many Victorian antiquaries did not, to interview a local old man and to print his memories. The man recalled that the top of Mow Cop used to be extensively wooded. How that came about would be interesting to know. Was it planted for timber or was it a natural and scrubby re-wilding? A thirty-year growth would be about right for the 1850s, if the economic slump of the 1820s and then the 1840s had caused widespread abandonment and also removal of the sheep — which would otherwise devastate such uplands.

Importantly for local folklore, he recalled that there used to be annual well-dressing ceremonies, and the book shows a drawing of one well. It might have slipped my memory, but I don’t recall that I’d heard anywhere else that there had once been an annual well-dressing event on Mow Cop. There is also a Woodcocks’ Well School on Mow Cop, so that may give another name.

That might perhaps be an inspiration for local people today, in terms of re-starting the well-dressing and also pairing it with summit tree-planting and litter-picking along the watercourses and around the wells. There was also an Eisteddfod at nearby Kidsgrove from 1913-1955, in which Mow Cop schools won prizes. So singing might feature too.