Gold and its Glitter

[Catapulta]

Hi, Professor Corey and everyone! I don't usually post (I believe this one is my second post, as a matter of fact), but now that we just read the poem of Aragorn, I wanted to share something with you. I wrote a very, very brief essay about the saying "not all that glitters is gold" and the twist that Tolkien makes on it on the poem of Aragorn. I wrote it on January 2017 for a blog that I have with a bunch of friends. It deals with the point we were studying last time, about the seemingly little difference with the original proverb, which ultimately becomes very important. The thing is, it is in Spanish. But I really wanted to share it with you, as I believe you'll find it interesting at least. So, I translated it for everyone here. I'll leave it attached as a PDF file. Please forgive any strangely construed sentences or mistakes on my part, and if anything is so badly said that it is unintelligible, I'll try to clarify it. I hope you find it worthwhile.

 

[SteveR]

Well done! Good work tracking the various references.

 

[Catapulta]

Well done! Good work tracking the various references.

Thanks! And thank you for reading!

 

[Catapulta]

Hi, Professor Corey and everyone! I don't usually post (I believe this one is my second post, as a matter of fact), but now that we just read the poem of Aragorn, I wanted to share something with you. I wrote a very, very brief essay about the saying "not all that glitters is gold" and the twist that Tolkien makes on it on the poem of Aragorn. I wrote it on January 2017 for a blog that I have with a bunch of friends. It deals with the point we were studying last time, about the seemingly little difference with the original proverb, which ultimately becomes very important. The thing is, it is in Spanish. But I really wanted to share it with you, as I believe you'll find it interesting at least. So, I translated it for everyone here. I'll leave it attached as a PDF file. Please forgive any strangely construed sentences or mistakes on my part, and if anything is so badly said that it is unintelligible, I'll try to clarify it. I hope you find it worthwhile.

I've noticed two mistakes since I shared this PDF:

1) The second time Chaucer is mentioned, I misspelled his name as Chauster.
2) The links in the document don't work. So, for anyone interested, here they are:
For note 1: here.
For note 3: here.
For note 8: here.

ADDENDUM: I have found other variations of the saying since. It seems that the proverb could have been oral wisdom in Latin. It is written by Alain de Lille (Alanus ab Insulis) in the 12th century, as "Non teneas aurum totum quod splendet ut aurum, nec pulchrum pomum quodlibet esse bonum", which I think can be translated to "Do not take everything that shines like gold as if it were gold, nor is any beautiful apple a good." The German version of the main proverb is "es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt", and seems to have been directly taken from the english one made popular by Shakespeare. But interestingly enough, the second part of Alain de Lille's proverb is attested in at least six different German versions of the saying! (according to the Concise Dictionary of European Proverbs of Emanuel Strauss). Could it be that for some european people at the time, the image of the apple was more powerful to represent worth than the one about gold? Be that as it may, it seems like the gold one is more common nowadays.