Gemini.Finnegans.Wake.21

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Here (please to stoop) are selveran cued peteet peas of quite a pecuniar interest inaslittle as they are the pellets that make the tomtummy’s pay roll. Right rank ragnar rocks and with these rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong. Wisha, wisha, whydidtha? Thik is for thorn that’s thuck in its thoil like thumfool’s thraitor thrust for vengeance. What a mnice old mness it all mnakes! A middenhide hoard of objects! Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies, alfrids, beatties, cormacks and daltons. Owlets’ eegs (O stoop to please!) are here, creakish from triangular Toucheaterre beyond the wet prairie rared up in the midst of the cargon of prohibitive pomefructs but along landed Paddy Wippingham and the his garbagecans cotched the creeps of them pricker than our whosethere outofman could quick up her whatsthats. Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson. Racketeers and bottloggers.

On this Thursday morning, the book invites us to become archaeologists. Having established the world as a “claybook,” the narrator now asks us to stoop down and examine the specific artifacts found within the great rubbish heap of history.

The Midden Hoard

The central image is a middenhide hoard of objects—a treasure trove found hidden in a midden, which is an ancient refuse pile. This is where the raw data of the past is located: not in pristine monuments, but in the trash. The narrator calls it a mnice old mness (a nice old mess).

The Artifacts

This messy hoard contains a jumble of items from all layers of history:

  • Primordial Rocks: ragnar rocks from the age of Ragnarok, the Norse apocalypse, when ape-like beings (orangotangos) fought.
  • Ancient Writing: The runic letter Þ (Thorn), which is described as a thraitor thrust for vengeance, embedding violence into the very fabric of the alphabet.
  • Dublin’s Commerce: A list of items—Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies, alfrids, beatties, cormacks and daltons—which are all puns on the names of prominent Dublin merchant families from Joyce’s time. The city’s history is made of its commercial life.
  • Primal Secrets: Owlets' eegs (owl’s eggs, or perhaps the letter ‘O’ itself) found in a triangular tomb, associated with a cargo of forbidden fruit. The hoard is connected to a primal sin.

The Messy Truth

The paragraph makes two final points about this hoard:

  1. Discovery: It wasn’t found by careful scholars but by accident, by an ordinary Irishman, Paddy Wippingham, whose dogs sniffed it out. The past is often unearthed by chance.
  2. Interpretation: No matter how people try to analyze it (Somedivide and sumthelot), the result is always the same balifuson (confusion). The past can be dug up, but it can’t be neatly categorized or understood.

The paragraph ends with the cynical observation that those who deal with history often become Racketeers and bottloggers, exploiting the treasures of the past for their own gain.

20/08/2025, P.19.19, to be continued.