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Human extinction

Human extinction is the hypothetical end of the human species, either by population decline due to extraneous natural causes, such as an asteroid impact or large-scale volcanism, or via anthropogenic destruction (self-extinction), for example by sub-replacement fertility.

Some of the many possible contributors to anthropogenic hazard are climate change, global nuclear annihilation, biological warfare, weapons of mass destruction, and ecological collapse. Other scenarios center on emerging technologies, such as advanced artificial intelligence, biotechnology, or self-replicating nanobots.

The scientific consensus is that there is a relatively low risk of near-term human extinction due to natural causes. The likelihood of human extinction through humankind's own activities, however, is a current area of research and debate.

Early history of thinking about human extinction
Before the 18th and 19th centuries, the possibility that humans or other organisms could become extinct was viewed with scepticism. It contradicted the principle of plenitude, a doctrine that all possible things exist. The principle traces back to Aristotle, and was an important tenet of Christian theology. Ancient philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius wrote of the end of humankind only as part of a cycle of renewal. Marcion of Sinope was a proto-protestant who advocated for antinatalism that could lead to human extinction. Later philosophers such as Al-Ghazali, William of Ockham, and Gerolamo Cardano expanded the study of logic and probability and began wondering if abstract worlds existed, including a world without humans. Physicist Edmond Halley stated that the extinction of the human race may be beneficial to the future of the world.

The notion that species can become extinct gained scientific acceptance during the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, and by 1800 Georges Cuvier had identified 23 extinct prehistoric species. The doctrine was further gradually undermined by evidence from the natural sciences, particularly the discovery of fossil evidence of species that appeared to no longer exist, and the development of theories of evolution. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin discussed the extinction of species as a natural process and a core component of natural selection. Notably, Darwin was skeptical of the possibility of sudden extinction, viewing it as a gradual process. He held that the abrupt disappearances of species from the fossil record were not evidence of catastrophic extinctions, but rather represented unrecognised gaps in the record.

As the possibility of extinction became more widely established in the sciences, so did the prospect of human extinction. In the 19th century, human extinction became a popular topic in science (e.g., Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population) and fiction (e.g., Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man). In 1863, a few years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, William King proposed that Neanderthals were an extinct species of the genus Homo. The Romantic authors and poets were particularly interested in the topic. Lord Byron wrote about the extinction of life on Earth in his 1816 poem "Darkness", and in 1824 envisaged humanity being threatened by a comet impact, and employing a missile system to defend against it. Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man is set in a world where humanity has been nearly destroyed by a mysterious plague. At the turn of the 20th century, Russian cosmism, a precursor to modern transhumanism, advocated avoiding humanity's extinction by colonizing space.

Atomic era
The invention of the atomic bomb prompted a wave of discussion among scientists, intellectuals, and the public at large about the risk of human extinction. In a 1945 essay, Bertrand Russell wrote that "[T]he prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind are faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense." In 1950, Leo Szilard suggested it was technologically feasible to build a cobalt bomb that could render the planet unlivable. A 1950 Gallup poll found that 19% of Americans believed that another world war would mean "an end to mankind". Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring raised awareness of environmental catastrophe. In 1983, Brandon Carter proposed the Doomsday argument, which used Bayesian probability to predict the total number of humans that will ever exist.

The discovery of "nuclear winter" in the early 1980s, a specific mechanism by which nuclear war could result in human extinction, again raised the issue to prominence. Writing about these findings in 1983, Carl Sagan argued that measuring the severity of extinction solely in terms of those who die "conceals its full impact", and that nuclear war "imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will be humans."

Post-Cold War
John Leslie's 1996 book The End of The World was an academic treatment of the science and ethics of human extinction. In it, Leslie considered a range of threats to humanity and what they have in common. In 2003, British Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees published Our Final Hour, in which he argues that advances in certain technologies create new threats to the survival of humankind and that the 21st century may be a critical moment in history when humanity's fate is decided. Edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković, Global Catastrophic Risks was published in 2008, a collection of essays from 26 academics on various global catastrophic and existential risks. Toby Ord's 2020 book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity argues that preventing existential risks is one of the most important moral issues of our time. The book discusses, quantifies, and compares different existential risks, concluding that the greatest risks are presented by unaligned artificial intelligence and biotechnology.

Causes
Potential anthropogenic causes of human extinction include global thermonuclear war, deployment of a highly effective biological weapon, an ecological collapse, runaway artificial intelligence, runaway nanotechnology (such as a grey goo scenario), vacuum metastability disaster, overpopulation and increased consumption pose the risk of resource depletion and a concomitant population crash, population decline by choosing to have fewer children, displacement of naturally evolved humans by a new species produced by genetic engineering or technological augmentation. Natural and external extinction risks include high-fatality-rate pandemic, supervolcanic eruption, asteroid impact, nearby supernova or gamma-ray bursts, extreme solar flare, or alien invasion.

Humans (e.g. Homo sapiens sapiens) as a species may also be considered to have "gone extinct" simply by being replaced with distant descendants whose continued evolution may produce new species or subspecies Homo or of hominids.

Without intervention by unexpected forces, the stellar evolution of the Sun is expected to make Earth uninhabitable, then destroy it. Depending on its ultimate fate, the entire universe may eventually become uninhabitable.

Natural vs. anthropogenic
Experts generally agree that anthropogenic existential risks are (much) more likely than natural risks. A key difference between these risk types is that empirical evidence can place an upper bound on the level of natural risk. Humanity has existed for at least 200,000 years, over which it has been subject to a roughly constant level of natural risk. If the natural risk were sufficiently high, then it would be highly unlikely that humanity would have survived as long as it has. Based on a formalization of this argument, researchers have concluded that we can be confident that natural risk is lower than 1 in 14,000 per year (equivalent to 1 in 140 per century, on average).

Another empirical method to study the likelihood of certain natural risks is to investigate the geological record. For example, a comet or asteroid impact event sufficient in scale to cause an impact winter that would cause human extinction before the year 2100 has been estimated at one-in-a-million. Moreover, large supervolcano eruptions may cause a volcanic winter that could endanger the survival of humanity. The geological record suggests that supervolcanic eruptions are estimated to occur on average about once every 50,000 years, though most such eruptions would not reach the scale required to cause human extinction. Famously, the supervolcano Mt. Toba may have almost wiped out humanity at the time of its last eruption (though this is contentious).

Since anthropogenic risk is a relatively recent phenomenon, humanity's track record of survival cannot provide similar assurances. Humanity has only survived 78 years since the creation of nuclear weapons, and for future technologies, there is no track record. This has led thinkers like Carl Sagan to conclude that humanity is currently in a "time of perils" – a uniquely dangerous period in human history, where it is subject to unprecedented levels of risk, beginning from when humans first started posing risk to themselves through their actions.

Risk estimates
Given the limitations of ordinary observation and modeling, expert elicitation is frequently used instead to obtain probability estimates.

 * Humanity has a 95% probability of being extinct in 7,800,000 years, according to J. Richard Gott's formulation of the controversial doomsday argument, which argues that we have probably already lived through half the duration of human history.
 * In 1996, John A. Leslie estimated a 30% risk over the next five centuries (equivalent to around 6% per century, on average).
 * In 2003, Martin Rees estimated a 50% chance of collapse of civilisation in the twenty-first century.
 * A 2008 survey by the Future of Humanity Institute estimated a 5% probability of extinction by super-intelligence by 2100.
 * The Global Challenges Foundation's 2016 annual report estimates an annual probability of human extinction of at least 0.05% per year (equivalent to 5% per century, on average).
 * A 2016 survey of AI experts found a median estimate of 5% that human-level AI would cause an outcome that was "extremely bad (e.g. human extinction)". In 2019, the risk was lowered to 2%, but in 2022, it was increased back to 5%. In 2023, the risk doubled to 10%. In 2024, the risk doubled to 20%, according to Elon Musk.
 * In 2020, Toby Ord estimates existential risk in the next century at "1 in 6" in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. He also estimated a "1 in 10" risk of extinction by unaligned AI within the next century.
 * According to the July 10, 2023 article of The Economist, scientists estimated a 12% chance of AI-caused catastrophe and a 3% chance of AI-caused extinction by 2100. They also estimate an 8% chance of Nuclear War causing global catastrophe and a 0.5625% chance of Nuclear War causing human extinction.
 * In May 1, 2023, The Treaty on Artificial Intelligence Safety and Cooperation (TAISC) estimated a 30.5% risk of an AI-caused catastrophe by 2200, although they also estimated a 32.2% risk of an AI-caused catastrophe by 2026, if there is no 6 month moratorium.
 * As of March 26, 2024, Metaculus users estimate a 1% probability of human extinction by 2100.
 * In a 2010 interview with The Australian, the late Australian scientist Frank Fenner predicted the extinction of the human race within a century, primarily as the result of human overpopulation, environmental degradation and climate change.
 * According to a 2020 study published in Scientific Reports, if deforestation and resource consumption continue at current rates, they could culminate in a "catastrophic collapse in human population" and possibly "an irreversible collapse of our civilization" in the next 20 to 40 years. According to the most optimistic scenario provided by the study, the chances that human civilization survives are smaller than 10%. To avoid this collapse, the study says, humanity should pass from a civilization dominated by the economy to a "cultural society" that "privileges the interest of the ecosystem above the individual interest of its components, but eventually in accordance with the overall communal interest."
 * Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, argues that it would be "misguided" to assume that the probability of near-term extinction is less than 25% and that it will be "a tall order" for the human race to "get our precautions sufficiently right the first time", given that an existential risk provides no opportunity to learn from failure.
 * Philosopher John A. Leslie assigns a 70% chance of humanity surviving the next five centuries, based partly on the controversial philosophical doomsday argument that Leslie champions. Leslie's argument is somewhat frequentist, based on the observation that human extinction has never been observed, but requires subjective anthropic arguments. Leslie also discusses the anthropic survivorship bias (which he calls an "observational selection" effect on page 139) and states that the a priori certainty of observing an "undisastrous past" could make it difficult to argue that we must be safe because nothing terrible has yet occurred. He quotes Holger Bech Nielsen's formulation: "We do not even know if there should exist some extremely dangerous decay of say the proton which caused the eradication of the earth, because if it happens we would no longer be there to observe it and if it does not happen there is nothing to observe."
 * Jean-Marc Salotti calculated the probability of human extinction caused by a giant asteroid impact. It is between 0.03 and 0.3 for the next billion years, if there is no colonization of other planets. According to that study, the most frightening object is a giant long-period comet with a warning time of a few years only and therefore no time for any intervention in space or settlement on the Moon or Mars. The probability of a giant comet impact in the next hundred years is $0$.

Individual vs. species risks
Although existential risks are less manageable by individuals than, for example, health risks, according to Ken Olum, Joshua Knobe, and Alexander Vilenkin, the possibility of human extinction does have practical implications. For instance, if the "universal" doomsday argument is accepted, it changes the most likely source of disasters, and hence the most efficient means of preventing them. They write: "...you should be more concerned that a large number of asteroids have not yet been detected than about the particular orbit of each one. You should not worry especially about the chance that some specific nearby star will become a supernova, but more about the chance that supernovas are more deadly to nearby life than we believe."

Difficulty
Some scholars argue that certain scenarios such as global thermonuclear war would have difficulty eradicating every last settlement on Earth. Physicist Willard Wells points out that any credible extinction scenario would have to reach into a diverse set of areas, including the underground subways of major cities, the mountains of Tibet, the remotest islands of the South Pacific, and even to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which has contingency plans and supplies for long isolation. In addition, elaborate bunkers exist for government leaders to occupy during a nuclear war. The existence of nuclear submarines, which can stay hundreds of meters deep in the ocean for potentially years at a time, should also be considered. Any number of events could lead to a massive loss of human life, but if the last few (see minimum viable population) most resilient humans are unlikely to also die off, then that particular human extinction scenario may not seem credible.

Value of human life
"Existential risks" are risks that threaten the entire future of humanity, whether by causing human extinction or by otherwise permanently crippling human progress. Multiple scholars have argued based on the size of the "cosmic endowment" that because of the inconceivably large number of potential future lives that are at stake, even small reductions of existential risk have great value.

In one of the earliest discussions of ethics of human extinction, Derek Parfit offers the following thought experiment:

The scale of what is lost in an existential catastrophe is determined by humanity's long-term potential – what humanity could expect to achieve if it survived. From a utilitarian perspective, the value of protecting humanity is the product of its duration (how long humanity survives), its size (how many humans there are over time), and its quality (on average, how good is life for future people). On average, species survive for around a million years before going extinct. Parfit points out that the Earth will remain habitable for around a billion years. And these might be lower bounds on our potential: if humanity is able to expand beyond Earth, it could greatly increase the human population and survive for trillions of years. The size of the foregone potential that would be lost, were humanity to become extinct, is very large. Therefore, reducing existential risk by even a small amount would have a very significant moral value.

Carl Sagan wrote in 1983: "If we are required to calibrate extinction in numerical terms, I would be sure to include the number of people in future generations who would not be born.... (By one calculation), the stakes are one million times greater for extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill "only" hundreds of millions of people. There are many other possible measures of the potential loss – including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise."

Philosopher Robert Adams in 1989 rejected Parfit's "impersonal" views but spoke instead of a moral imperative for loyalty and commitment to "the future of humanity as a vast project... The aspiration for a better society – more just, more rewarding, and more peaceful... our interest in the lives of our children and grandchildren, and the hopes that they will be able, in turn, to have the lives of their children and grandchildren as projects."

Philosopher Nick Bostrom argues in 2013 that preference-satisfactionist, democratic, custodial, and intuitionist arguments all converge on the common-sense view that preventing existential risk is a high moral priority, even if the exact "degree of badness" of human extinction varies between these philosophies.

Parfit argues that the size of the "cosmic endowment" can be calculated from the following argument: If Earth remains habitable for a billion more years and can sustainably support a population of more than a billion humans, then there is a potential for 10$16$ (or 10,000,000,000,000,000) human lives of normal duration. Bostrom goes further, stating that if the universe is empty, then the accessible universe can support at least 10$34$ biological human life-years; and, if some humans were uploaded onto computers, could even support the equivalent of 10$54$ cybernetic human life-years.

Some economists and philosophers have defended views, including exponential discounting and person-affecting views of population ethics, on which future people do not matter (or matter much less), morally speaking. While these views are controversial, they would agree that an existential catastrophe would be among the worst things imaginable. It would cut short the lives of eight billion presently existing people, destroying all of what makes their lives valuable, and most likely subjecting many of them to profound suffering. So even setting aside the value of future generations, there may be strong reasons to reduce existential risk, grounded in concern for presently existing people.

Beyond utilitarianism, other moral perspectives lend support to the importance of reducing existential risk. An existential catastrophe would destroy more than just humanity – it would destroy all cultural artifacts, languages, and traditions, and many of the things we value. So moral viewpoints on which we have duties to protect and cherish things of value would see this as a huge loss that should be avoided. One can also consider reasons grounded in duties to past generations. For instance, Edmund Burke writes of a "partnership...between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born". If one takes seriously the debt humanity owes to past generations, Ord argues the best way of repaying it might be to "pay it forward", and ensure that humanity's inheritance is passed down to future generations.

There are several economists who have discussed the importance of global catastrophic risks. For example, Martin Weitzman argues that most of the expected economic damage from climate change may come from the small chance that warming greatly exceeds the mid-range expectations, resulting in catastrophic damage. Richard Posner has argued that humanity is doing far too little, in general, about small, hard-to-estimate risks of large-scale catastrophes.

Voluntary extinction
Some philosophers adopt the antinatalist position that human extinction would not be a bad thing, but a good thing. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always serious harm, and therefore it is better that people do not come into existence in the future. Further, David Benatar, animal rights activist Steven Best, and anarchist Todd May, posit that human extinction would be a positive thing for the other organisms on the planet, and the planet itself, citing, for example, the omnicidal nature of human civilization. The environmental view in favor of human extinction is shared by the members of Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia who call for refraining from reproduction and allowing the human species to go peacefully extinct, thus stopping further environmental degradation.

In fiction
Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's 1805 science fantasy novel Le dernier homme (The Last Man), which depicts human extinction due to infertility, is considered the first modern apocalyptic novel and credited with launching the genre. Other notable early works include Mary Shelley's 1826 The Last Man, depicting human extinction caused by a pandemic, and Olaf Stapledon's 1937 Star Maker, "a comparative study of omnicide".

Some 21st century pop-science works, including The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, and the television specials Life After People and Aftermath: Population Zero pose a thought experiment: what would happen to the rest of the planet if humans suddenly disappeared? A threat of human extinction, such as through a technological singularity (also called an intelligence explosion), drives the plot of innumerable science fiction stories; an influential early example is the 1951 film adaption of When Worlds Collide. Usually the extinction threat is narrowly avoided, but some exceptions exist, such as R.U.R. and Steven Spielberg's A.I.

title: Human extinction


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Talk:Tourism in mainland China

"China"/"PRC" vs. "mainland China" for page titles
Following the long discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese) regarding proper titling of Mainland China-related topics, polls for each single case has now been started here. Please come and join the discussion, and cast your vote. Thank you. — Instantnood 14:56, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)

 * 1) redirect Talk:Tourism in China

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Tourism in mainland China


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Talk:Open gaming/Archive 2

Time to get serious
I've made a number of edits and additions to this article over the past several months. These include, but are not limited to:

 * Adding several paragraphs concerning Fudge and the Fudge Legal Notice
 * Clarifying the distinction between the d20 license and the Open Game License, and correcting the article where it referred to one where it ought to refer to the other
 * Made numerous grammatical improvements (adding missing commas, adding missing words, removing redundant words, etc.)
 * Updated the Open Game License section to correct a few errors and remove unsubstantiated and highly POV editorializing
 * Added external links for the Fudge Legal Notice and the Open Game License
 * Sorted the list of open licenses and the list of external links

I think that's about it.

For reasons I will not speculate on, Axon keeps reverting these edits  , damaging the article in the process. I reported this behavior to Wikipedia, and was banned for my trouble, so I won't be doing that again any time soon.

However, after taking an extended break from Wikipedia, wherein I spent no more than a few minutes of my time once a month to add a paragraph here and there and revert any vandalism disputed edits, I am newly inspired to give it my full attention. Ironically, you can thank Axon for that: his constant false complaints to Wikipedia                 were making my semi-retirement from Wikipedia as much of a nuisance as my previous activity was. So then, why not be active? Ergo, for the foreseeable future, I'll be focusing on this and related articles, and trying to find ways to improve and expand it/them. I will be happy to discuss the content of the article with anyone who has an actual interest in improving it or adding objective, verifiable information. If Axon wants to mend his ways, stop vandalizing adding disputed edits without any discussion the article, and focus on improving it, I will even discuss it with him. Let bygones be bygones: grudges are a waste of time.

For example:

An encyclopedia article is not the place for vague, unsubstantiated claims and weasel words, nor is Wikipedia a soapbox for an editor's opinion. The article should be objective and verifiable. If citations can't be produced to support these assertions (making them detailed, verifiable claims rather than vague, unsubstantiated claims), they should be removed from the article.
 * I do not know a great deal about open gaming licenses other than the Creative Commons licneses, the GNU Free Documentation License, and the Open Gaming License (all active), and the Fudge Legal Notice and the October Open Game License (both defunct). However, if this article summarizes those five, it ought to summarize others, as well (either defunct or active). It also ought to devote similar amounts of verbiage to the active licenses, and similar amounts of verbiage to the defunct licenses.
 * Speaking of which, how much detail is too much? the WotC Open Game License, for example, has it own Wikipedia article. Does this article repeat too much of that? Should some of this information be re-located to that article?
 * Backing up a step, the "History" section, particularly the first two paragraphs, is meandering, and needs to be re-written. If no one does this in a reasonable timeframe, I'll do it, but for such a sweeping change I would prefer to work in collaboration with someone else who wants this article to be factual and informative.
 * Backing up even further, this article currently makes a lot of vague, unsubstantiated claims and weasel words, such as:
 * "A number of primarily small game developers..."
 * "...most major RPG developers..."
 * "Critics often complained..."
 * "...the concept of the OGF, unlike the Free Software Foundation upon which it was undoubtedly based..."
 * "...the OGL was heavily criticised in some quarters..."
 * etc.

"Not all information added to Wikipedia has to be from peer-reviewed journals; but strive to make sure that information is reliable and verifiable. For example, citing book, print, or reliable web resources demonstrates that the material is verifiable and is not the editor's opinion." (from What_Wikipedia_is_not)

"Weasel words don't really give a neutral point of view; they just spread hearsay, or couch personal opinion in vague, indirect syntax. It's better to put a name and a face on an opinion than to assign an opinion to an anonymous source." (from Avoid_weasel_terms)

Okay, that's a start. -- Bblackmoor 16:34, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

 * I'm glad to see you have finally decided to respond to discussion on the talk page after months of disruptive behaviour, and I'm much encouraged by this. However, I notice that, despite warnings from administrators, you continue to delete content from the article without prior discussion here and I have alerted an administrator of this.

 * I hope we can start a discussion without resorting to bad faith tactics such as incivility, personal attacks, incorrect accusations of vandalism, top posting comments (all new comments belong at the bottom of the talk page), etc.

 * While there is nothing disagreable in the content suggestions you make above (I'm ignoring the remarks you make about me - if you have any actual evidence of wrong-doing I suggest you provide evidence) for the rest of the article (GFDL, etc), I'm not sure how the rest relates to the dispute at hand and the resolution thereof. You should be making constructive remarks here. Axon (talk|contribs) 17:15, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

 * I have fully documented my revisions above, all of which are in accordance with Wikipedia policy (most notably the policies concerning weasel words and citations). You wanted me to be more active on this article: well, you've got your wish. If you wish to make modifications, please discuss them. Do not simply re-post your opinion in the thinly vieled guise of weasel words and vague, unsubstantiated claims. "Weasel words don't really give a neutral point of view; they just spread hearsay, or couch personal opinion in vague, indirect syntax. It's better to put a name and a face on an opinion than to assign an opinion to an anonymous source." (from Avoid_weasel_terms) If you have a genuine interest in contributing to this article, then feel free to discuss your contributions here. Weasel words and vague, unsubstantiated assertions aren't going to cut it. -- Bblackmoor 17:50, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

 * I think you misunderstand what discussion is: you post your specific concerns, instead of vague accusations, and we discuss it untill agreement is reached. Please list exactly here what your concerns with the edits are, preferably on a line-by-line basis and we can work from that. In my mind at least, none of the above seems directly related to any of my edits. Axon (talk|contribs) 18:08, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Stop re-posting your edits without discussing them first. Post, line by line, what edits you would like to make, and I will be happy to discuss them. -- Bblackmoor 18:11, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

 * If you would like to detail exactly what you object to about my edits, that would be preferable. I still have no idea what exactly you object to. Axon (talk|contribs) 09:20, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

"Primarily smaller game publishers"
I made several edits this morning: for the most part these are simply corrections and additions, a slight re-write of a couple of sections to smooth out the clunky prose, and the removal of a few weasel words and one section with blatant POV (which needs to be discussed before it is posted again). None of that should prove controversial, as it's primarily clarifying or expanding upon the content rather than altering its meaning.

However, I did make one change which substantially changes the meaning of the passage: in the second paragraph, I changed "A number of primarily smaller game developers have joined the open gaming initiative..." to "A number of role-playing game developers have joined the open gaming initiative...". There are two main reasons for this. First, "game developers" is vague. Thus the change to "role-playing game developers". Second, with the exception of WotC (which is owned by Hasbro), all role-playing game publishers are "small". Thus the removal of the redundant modifier "primarily small". -- BBlackmoor (talk) 09:05, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Just re-affirming what I state below (in the section currently titled "Statements from both parties") -- that I intend to move forward and focus on the content of this article, and leave past unpleasantness in the past. I've posted (under the section "Time to get serious") what I think is a reasonable assessment of the article's current status (not taking into account its later protection by SlimVirgin), and what I think are reasonable plans for its future development. We could either start with specific sections and work on them, or we could take a step back and look at the overall organization of the article first (although I generally think the pre-protection organization of the article was pretty good, I am sure it could be improved). I'll work with whatever seems reasonable to people. I encourage other editors to respond to my observations and suggestions, or make their own suggestions for the content of this article. -- BBlackmoor (talk) 18:39, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Glad to hear it, but are you going to discuss the problems related directly to the content dispute as per my request above? I can't really see a way to resolve this dispute unless we both discuss precisely why you keep deleting content from the article. Axon (talk|contribs) 18:50, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Editing: Overview
Since no one has responded to my suggestions for the general future of this article, I'll assume that no one has a problem with it (at least for the time being). Of course, that may change, but for now I'll move forward. Beginning at the beginning, here is the introductory section from the last undisputed version of the Open gaming article, and my suggested replacement (which is based on the most recent version which I helped to edit). Suggestions for corrections, deletions, additions, and so on are welcome and invited. I'll be happy to discuss any of the changes I made, and my reasons for them. Once each section has been thoroughly discussed and there is concensus on what it should say, we can copy that section to the "live" article, and move on to the next section. -- BBlackmoor (talk) 05:29, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

--

Open gaming is the role-playing game movement, analagous to open source, where game-related content (rules, sourcebooks, etc) are published under a copyleft or open content license imparting the freedom to modify, copy, and redistribute them. Open gaming can also be used to refer to a type of role-playing game event where players free to join at any time. This essay deals primarily with the more common, former definition.

--

Open gaming is the movement within the role-playing game (RPG) industry that is somewhat analogous to the open source software movement. The open gaming movement refers to those who publish their content (rules, sourcebooks, etc.) under a "copyleft", open content, or free content license which grants the freedom to modify, copy, and redistribute some or all of the content, such as those who publish works derived or modified from the System Reference Document under the Open Gaming License. Open gaming can also be used to refer to a type of role-playing game event where players free to join at any time. This article deals with "open gaming" in the former sense.

A number of role-playing game publishers have joined the open gaming initiative, largely as a result of the release of the System Reference Document under the Open Gaming License by Wizards of the Coast. Open gaming has also been popular among amateur role-playing game and supplement authors. Several licenses have been used to facilitate open gaming. Despite this, the concept has yet to make a significant impact on games outside of pen-and-paper RPGs, and most commercial RPG publishers continue to use proprietary game systems.

--

 * I see you are top-posting again, BB. Please keep discussion in order of time for clarity and so that earlier responses to talk are not obscured. Obviously, I have repeatedly stated why we should not revert the version of the article mentioned aboveby BB I point people to my remarks below on this topic. Otherwise, the other version of the article you mention is obviously disputed because of the section on the OOGL. Axon (talk|contribs) 12:51, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

One thing I am concerned about is that just about every version of this page (disputed and otherwise) is shamefully light on citations and shamefully heavy on weasel words. One of my personal priorities, aside from simply turning this into a useful and intersting article, is to be more stringent when it comes to unsubstantiated claims. I believe that all of the claims made in the paragraphs I submitted above for the Overview section will be amply supported by facts further down in the article, but that is something we will have to keep a very careful eye on. If an assertion is made without it being amply supported by independent citations (either in that paragraph or elsewhere in the article), it ought to be rephrased or removed.

By "amply supported", I mean there ought to be several corroborating sources, and by "independent citations", I mean citations from sources other than the web site of the editor who happens to be adding the assertion (myself included), except in the rare case where the editor's website is the subject of the assertion (such as Axon posting a link to freeroleplay.org as a resource for web sites that support "open gaming" -- it's a valid link, and I have no problem with that at all). I think the "verifiability" and "no original research" policies strongly imply that this is the way to go. That's my take on it, anyway. -- BBlackmoor (talk) 21:10, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

No one has objected to or suggested re-phrasing anything in the "Overview" I submitted above. I'll give it a few more days, and if all is still quiet, I'll go ahead and revise the article using this "Overview", then move down to the next section. Sound like a plan? -- BBlackmoor (talk) 20:16, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Since no one has suggested any modifications to this suggested version of the "Overview" section, I'm going ahead and copying this to the article, and we can move on ot the next section. -- BBlackmoor (talk) 19:10, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Open gaming (protected)
Bblackmoor, you've been causing trouble around this article since February. Axon is an established editor, and you have 48 edits to articles, at least under that account. That doesn't mean Axon's right, of course, but it means as an admin, I'm inclined to take him seriously, and the fact that you've gone through dispute resolution, including to the arbcom, and no one seems to agree with you reinforces that view. I'm therefore going to protect the article on Axon's version, and I'm asking you two to discuss all the issues one by one here before starting to edit again. It would also be a good idea to put up an article RfC to attract the opinions of other editors. Let me know when you'd like me to unlock the page. That goes for any other editor too. Cheers, SlimVirgin (talk) 11:34, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * You state that I have been disrupting that article since February 2005. That is not correct: User:Axon has been disrupting this article, dating back to December of 2004, when he began using this article as his soapbox. It's unfortunate that you did not take a few minutes to read the history of the article before protecting it. Okay, let's say for sake of argument that you are just too busy to bother reading the edit history of the Open gaming article, and all you have to go on is the word of two editors. Let's suppose that you don't have the time to investigate the vandalism complaint I made against Axon -- since you obviously didn't check the facts before summarily deleting it.

 * Why on earth would you assume that one editor's complaints are valid and justified, and the other's are completely fabricated? Why would assume that one editor, whose only contributions to this article have been a) to revert other editor's contributions (primarily mine, but not just mine  ), and b) to post unsubstantiated opinion laden with weasel words?

 * Why would you assume that the complaints of the other editor, who has actually contributed much of the article's current content, and who has actively sought discussion on said content, are baseless?

 * For pete's sake, can't you exercise just a little effort before you declare that one editor's opinion should be enshrined as the incumbent version of the page? I even provided you a link to the last undisputed version of the page! Do consensus, verifiability, and NPOV mean nothing to you? I am more than happy to discuss Axon's edits -- but you'll note that he doesn't discuss them. He has never discussed them, and you people do not do anything about it! That's part of why I took a break from Wikipedia for so long, out of frustration and disgust (other than taking a few minutes once a month to revert Axon's latest vandalism disputed edits ). Of course, once I was no longer actively participating in Wikipedia, Axon was free to claim all kinds of things without fear of anyone contradicting him. It's easy to claim that you want to discuss things when no one is around to take you up on the offer (I won't even address his other slanders during that time, all of which you appear to have taken at face value). You'll note that he still isn't actually discussing anything. What he does (which seems to work quite well) is "contribute" his unsubstantiated opinion, and then complain to you when anyone else makes any edits at all. And, incredibly, this tactic works, because you are either too busy or too indifferent to check the facts.

 * Will you READ the edit history of the page before giving preferencial treatment to one editor's unsubstantiated opinion? Or if that is simply too time consuming, at least read the section on the Talk page titled "Time to get serious" (which gives a brief overview of the current status of the Open gaming article)? PLEASE? -- BBlackmoor (talk) 17:27, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * I'm afraid I don't understand the issues, so I can't help to sort out the content dispute. What I suggest is that someone puts up an article RfC, or posts to the mailing list asking for input from other editors who know something about this area. The reason I favored Axon's version, Bblackmoor, is that you've made very few edits to articles, and Axon is an established editor. Also, you filed what appeared to be a malicious, or at least wrong-headed, vandalism report, and you've been personally attacking him, calling him a net loon and vandal. All this puts you in the wrong, I'm afraid, in terms of our policies. SlimVirgin (talk) 16:54, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * If you'd been dealing with him as long as I have, without any help from Wikipedia at all, you'd be calling him much worse than that. But you'll not need to worry on that account, because you refuse to read the page you've protected, nor the Talk page, nor even check the citations where I give you easy, one-click links to Axon's edit history. Any editor can recognize weasel words: you don't need to know "the issues" to spot them. Any editor can choose to protect an undisputed version of a page rather than being completely snowed by an editor who has never discussed their edits despite MONTHS of outright begging that he do so, but who is obviously better at "playing the system" than I am. Is it any wonder that I'm frustrated? -- BBlackmoor (talk) 17:01, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * How can you call your version undisputed? It is being disputed by an established editor. I've put up a Request for Comment at Requests for comment/Other, though I've no idea whether it will get a response. Bblackmoor, can you explain why you're so angry about this and why it matters to you so much? SlimVirgin (talk) 18:40, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * "How can you call your version undisputed?" Oh. My. God. The undisputed version -- for which I've given you the link at least THREE TIMES (make it four now) -- was from a completely different user, predating all of this. Not only have you not read the page you're making decisions about, or the Talk page where most of this has been explained in detail over and again, you don't even read the Talk comments that you're replying to! AAAAAAAAAAAAARRGH! -- BBlackmoor (talk) 18:58, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Sorry about that BB. Some of your comments have been so long that I've only scanned them to be honest. I'll take a look at that version when I can, but WP is very slow today. SlimVirgin (talk) 19:36, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * I think the above is misleading: it's true the version BB reverts to is someone else's version, but only because that is the last version of the article that deletes my own edits. Otherwise, BB is reverting to an old version of the October Open Gaming License section: there is no real dispute with any other part of the article. Axon (talk|contribs) 09:24, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Don't feel bad, Slim; I've been trying to get a sense of what the conflict is on this page all week. BB and Axon are throwing a lot of policy and copyedit accusations at each other.... and that seems to be at a complete disconnect from the actual edit-war going on in the article... which appears to be a content issue. And I can't figure out what the content issue... is... exactly. One person seems to want to discuss the OOGL and maybe some criticism of it? And the other wants to remove it and/or whitewash? I think Axon is the inclusixe and BB the removal party, but I lose track since the talk discussion has nothing to do with anything.
 * ...At this point, I think I'm just talking to myself... and indulging my love of the ellipses.
 * Fox1 19:59, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * That would be an accurate assessment, Fox1. Axon (talk|contribs) 09:24, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Ok, I don't mind protecting on the 16:01 December 2, 2004 version as BB suggested, if Axon agrees. Axon, what do you think? Fox1, thanks, and I think your ellipses are very nice. I can see why you love them. ;-) SlimVirgin (talk) 20:16, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Hi SV, I would politely disgree that we protect on the December 2 version: BB's long-term objective here is to remove and whitewash all mention of the OOGL from Wikipedia so an older version before the OOGL edits would, effectively, be a version preferable to him and that is disputed by me, IMHO. I would ask we protect on the current version as-is so that BB is at least motivated to give discussion on the talk page with me a fair chance. Otherwise, I feel that it would be rewarding BB's flouting of Wikipedia policy for which he has been successfully blocked twice and punish me for abiding by Wikipedia policy. Axon (talk|contribs) 09:16, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Statements by both parties
Okay, deep breath... I'll try to hit the high spots for people who came in late. Maybe someone will go to the trouble of reading it and clicking the reference links.

Once upon a time, the Open gaming article looked like this. Axon thought that it was a good idea to devote most of the article to his criticisms of a license which had, at that time, not been used for around two years. Some of what he posted was factual; some was not. Initially, I thought that this was a waste of time and undermined the value of the article. As a result of the RfC (which I requested), I changed my mind, and decided that it was a worthwhile footnote in the history of "open gaming". To that end, and in accordance with what little community response there was (Axon himself refusing to discuss anything), I added factual details to the section on the OOGL, and removed the unsubstantiated opinion and weasel words which Axon had contributed. He would immediately delete verifiable facts and replace them with weasel words and assertions.

This continued interminably. I requested assistance from Wikipedia (in the form of surveys, an RFC, and a Request For Arbitration), and, much like now, no one could be bothered to review the facts before taking action. Axon's efforts were more effective than mine: he refrained participating in any discussion, and sabotaged what little discussion there was. He was also more patient, and that patience was rewarded: I eventually gave up in frustration, and swore off Wikipedia for a number of months. In my absence, he said a lot of things, not all of which were true. About once a month I would take a minute or two to revert Axon's vandalism disputed edits, and he would promptly add it again, even going so far as reverting corrections to spelling and grammar. That was the state of things throughout the spring and summer of 2005.

Now, in October 2005, I have decided to become an active editor again. In that vein, I posted a pretty thorough review of my previous edits of the Open gaming article, along with what I consider to be reasonable plans for its future development. I invited any and all interested parties, including Axon, to participate. As before, Axon has yet to discuss anything. -- BBlackmoor (talk) 21:41, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

 * The above is incomplete: you have failed to mention the bad faith tactics you have indulged in, thepersonal attacks, the meat pupetting and the other tactics. I would also note that I have made several efforts to discuss the above with you. If you can't even admit that much, I don't know what else we can do. Axon (talk|contribs) 09:18, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

 * To summarise: the dispute revolves around the October Open Gaming License with is authored by the BB. BB's objective is to delete and remove all mention of it, and get me banned in the process for the trouble of mentioning it in the article. Originally, he deleted the content without discussion with me and has had a history of refusing to discuss content on this topic, preferring to rules lawyer in this area. Whilst he did indeed start the dispute resolution process, it was peppered with personal attacks and bad faith tactics such as incivility, top posting, threats that I would be banned and other such tactics and effectively side-lined me from the process. Regardless, the RfC was far from inconclusive, as BB has suggested, and in fact conclusively found in favour of keeping the section on the OOGL.

 * However, When he realised that he could not force me to compromise without compromising himself (i.e. treating me with civility and discussing the content reasonably) BB started an abortive RfAr against me which demonstrably failed because the ArbCom felt, similarly, that he had not properly attempted dispute resolution. His tactics since then have been far worse as I have highlighted to SV. I would admit I have reverted other edits along with my attempts to re-add my content for the OOGL section, but such is the nature of reverts that sometimes other edits are included by accident of by expediency. However, as can be seen from the "Time to get serious" section above, he continues to flip-flop on actually highlighting what content exactly he objects to. Axon (talk|contribs) 09:32, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

 * I would also like to note that BB has since been editing my user pages. Although he did subsequently revert his changes, I can't help feeling this is yet more evidence of his inability to work in a civil manner. Axon (talk|contribs) 09:47, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Well, I'm not going to spend all day on this, so I'll hit the high points.
 * Is my "long-term objective here is to remove and whitewash all mention of the OOGL from Wikipedia"? Well, I don't claim to know what Axon means by "whitewash" (in context, it appears to mean "remove Axon's POV"), but as I stated above, when Axon added his POV on the October Open Gaming License to the Open gaming article last December, I considered it an irrelevant distraction which undermined the quality of the article. As a result of the RfC that _I requested_, I was convinced otherwise. In point of fact, I contributed nearly all of the verifiable facts in that section of the Open gaming article (most of which, of course, Axon repeatedly deletes).
 * Have I "deleted the content without discussion with [Axon]"? Yes, repeatedly, because Axon refuses to discuss his edits. Has Axon posted his POV, and reverted any and all changes to this article (including sections which have nothing to do with the OOGL) without discussion from anyone? Yes, repeatedly. Has Axon contributed anything to this article other than his OOGL-related POV? Precious little. Have I contributed to this article, other than OOGL-related information? Yes, quite a bit. Has Axon repeatedly deleted other people's edits (primarily mine, but not just mine) regardless of the subject, without disussion from anyone? Yes, repeatedly.
 * Have I been uncivil? Oh, yes. On the other hand, I feel I have been far more civil than Axon deserves. However, it has been made clear to me that on Wikipedia civility is more important than accuracy, so I intend to be civil from this point forward (from a couple of days ago forward, actually). If I can't say something civil, I will not say anything at all.
 * I aborted the RfAr because it became painfully obvious from the ArbCom's comnments that they were not going to the trouble of actually reviewing the edit history of the Open gaming article, and were making suggestions which had been already tried repeatedly for months, which they would have known had they bothered to examine the history of the dispute. (With all due respect to SlimVirgin, I think she has learned recently that this is not an outrageous claim.) I was disgusted with the whole process, and swore off Wikipedia for the better part of a year. Frankly, by that time, my patience with the whole ordeal was just exhausted.
 * Have I edited Axon's user pages? Yes, to demonstrate his hypocrisy. I reverted those changes a day or two later, essentially because I felt it was counterproductive and petty.
 * Have I ever been banned from Wikipedia? Yes, once: SlimVirgin banned me for a day earlier this week for filing a vandalism complaint against Axon (with specific facts and citations to back it up). SlimVirgin has never explained why I was banned, but I assume it was because of my "uncivil" behavior. (Axon has brought to my attention that I actually was banned earlier this year, during the time I had sworn off Wikipedia, which is why I wasn't even aware of it until yesterday. It's safe to say that Axon had something to do with that, since he knew about it and I didn't, but other than that it's a mystery to me. Frankly, I don't see much point in investigating it, either.)
 * Axon makes a great many malicious claims about me. I am not going to bother to refute them all individually. Life is too short. Suffice to say that Axon says a lot of things. Not all of them are true.
 * Now, over half of what I've just written is a repetition of what I've written above at least once, if not several times, before. I do not intend to repeat myself any further. The facts are plain, and I am not going to spend the next several years of my life playing "he said/she said" with Axon. The past is a matter of record, and anyne who wants to examine it may do so without my help. If that means Axon continues to make spurious claims uncontested, so be it. I am making a choice to move forward.
 * What I intend to do, from this point forward, is discuss the content of this article with anyone else who would like to discuss the content of this article. I posted above, in the "Time to get serious" and "Primarily smaller game publishers" sections, what I think is a reasonable assessment of the article's current status (not taking into account its later protection by SlimVirgin), and what I think are reasonable plans for its future development. It is my hope that someone out there will share my goal of making this article factual, educational, interesting, well-written, and in accordance with Wikipedia's various policies on article content. -- BBlackmoor (talk) 17:31, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
 * In line with my intention to focus on the content of this article, and put past unpleasantness in the past, I am refreshing my knowledge of the various Wikipedia content policies. Until earlier this week, I'd been away from Wikipedia for the better part of a year, and if I ever was familiar with them all, I certainly needed a fresher. One of the policies that I think is relevant to Axon's complaints about me, and mine about him, concerns "vandalism". We have accused each other of vandalism numerous times, and for my part the accusation was sincere. However, it is clear from reading the policy on Vandalism that these accusations were in error. For myself, I would say that all of the actions by Axon which I characterized as "vandalism" are listed explicitly under the heading What vandalism is not. It doesn't get much clearer than that. Ergo, from this point forward I will make a serious effort to be more fastidious when referring to the actions of other editors, despite how strongly I disagree with them. I am not going to go back and re-edit my previous comments, because I don't want to be accused of "whitewashing" (heavens forbid), but I am making it clear that I acknowledge the error and will strive to prevent repeating it. -- BBlackmoor (talk) 21:25, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Hmmm... I don't really have the time to go through all of that and I don't really see much point: most of it is the normal mix of unverifiable and dubious conjecture (for example, you only "aborted" the RfAr after the majority of ArbCom had voted to reject it in the first place) covered by a generous helping of vague accusation. I think BB's actions (the personal attacks, the mallicious vandalism reports, his anonymous vandalism of this page, the user page vandalism) speak for themselves. Again, if he has any actual evidence of wrong-doing on my part I ask he give real evidence here (preferably as succintly as possible).
 * I do find it amusing that you claim (using good, old bold letters) that you want to talk about the content only, after you spend an essay writing about non-content issues, and when you have yet to actually raise any specific points about the content above and ignore my requests for the same. Once again, I politely request you let me know your actual concerns with my edits are and perhaps we can get some agreement with this while the page is protected. Axon (talk|contribs) 18:17, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Open gaming/Archive 2


text:
Talk:Inagh

Untitled
In ancient times its Gaelic name meant the fetid or foul district of Cinel Fearmaic and Cormaic.

What was this name? -- Picapica 11:51, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Inagh


text:
Irereo

Irereo Fáthach ("the wise"), son of Meilge Molbthach, was, according to medieval Irish legend and historical tradition, a High King of Ireland. He took power after killing his predecessor, Óengus Ollom, and ruled for seven or ten years, until he was killed in Ulster by Fer Corb, son of Mug Corb. The Lebor Gabála Érenn synchronises his reign with that of Ptolemy III Euergetes of Egypt (246–222 BC). The chronology of Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn dates his reign to 337–330 BC, the Annals of the Four Masters to 481–474 BC.

title: Irereo


text:
User:Ramorosi

Occasional contributor. Varied interests. Never enough time for too much playing... r 11:57, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

title: User:Ramorosi


text:
Dan Ar Braz

Dan Ar Braz (Daniel Le Bras was born on January 15, 1949, in Quimper France. He is a Breton guitarist-singer-composer and the founder of L'Héritage des Celtes, a 50-piece Pan-Celt band. As a leading guitarist in Celtic music band, he recorded as a soloist with Celtic harp player Alan Stivell. He also represented France in the Eurovision Song Contest 1996.

Apprenticeship and Alan Stivell years
At the age of 13, Daniel Le Bras obtained his first guitar after teaching himself how to play, inspired by guitarists like Hank Marvin, Bert Jansch, and Pretty Things. Daniel's father insisted that he study catering instead of music. At the age of 17, he performed locally in Bal-musette, interpreting folk-rock songs by Donovan, Van Morrison, and Rory Gallagher.

In 1967, Bras met Breton harpist and singer Alan Stivell who invited him to join his group. Alan Stivell and his musicians embraced Breton, Scottish, and Irish music, and were also later joined by Gabriel Yacoub to form Malicorne. Alan's father had made a reconstruction of the ancient Breton harp in 1953, and Alan learned to play the harp, bagpipes, and Irish flute.

Stivell opened Bras's eyes to the possibilities of Celtic music and its proximity to rock. Stivell rebranded Daniel Le Bras as "Dan Ar Bras" to show that he belonged to Breton culture rather than French culture. In 1971, with "Pop Plinn", "for the first time rock music was put in service for a traditional Breton dance song." His electric guitar made the "essential element of Stivell's sound for more than a decade" and made contributions to nine of Stivell's albums, including the influential "Renaissance of the Celtic Harp" and "Olympia Concert" in 1972. After a successful tour in France in 1972–73, Breton Music was undergoing a revival and they traveled around Europe, North America, and Australia.

At the same time in 1972, Dan Ar Bras formed his own group called Mor. Compared to Stivell's group, this was the middle-of-the-road and it broke up shortly after recording one album, Stations, released in 1973.

Solo career
In 1976, Braz relocated to Oxfordshire and joined the folk-rock band Fairport Convention. He changed his name to Dan Ar Braz (with a "z"), and for about a year he toured with the band but did not perform on any of their studio albums. This experience allowed him to work with prominent Anglophone musicians such as Dave Pegg and Rory Gallagher, and even appeared on the cover of Melody Maker (February 1976).

Homesick for Brittany, Braz released the instrumental progressive folk album, "Douar Nevez" in 1977. In three years, he recorded three Celtic music solo-albums. By this time, he was making sales in the United States.

1980s
Braz released a collegian album of Irish jigs and reels in 1979, entitled Irish Reels, Jigs, Hornpipes and Airs with a band featuring Davey Graham, Dave Evans, and Duck Baker. It was not commercially successful, and for several years, Braz moved away from Celtic music. In 1981, he toured Europe promoting his album Acoustic, a subdued collection of instrumentals, written by himself. He then joined a blues-rock trio. Between 1984 and 1987, he toured the United States over a dozen times.. By the time Braz recorded Musiques pour les silences à venir (Music for the Silences to Come) in 1985, he was being described as "New Age". After making another instrumental album, he moved in a new direction by recording a collection of songs in English, Songs (1990). Most were written by him, plus one each by Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Paul Brady, and Donovan. He teamed up with John Kirkpatrick to record a film score in 1992.

Formation and success
Dan Ar Braz's greatest moment occurred in 1992, when the organizer of the Festival de Cornouaille in Quimper asked him to create a live show uniting traditional music with modern styles. Dan had many contacts in Britain, France, and America, and delivered beyond all expectations. Donal Lunny came from Ireland, Karen Matheson came from Scotland, Elaine Morgan came from Wales, and both Bagad Kemper and Alan Stivell came from Brittany. Altogether, 75 musicians were involved. The group called L'Héritage des Celtes performed their debut show at the Quimper festival in July 1993, then went on to Rennes in 1994. A hugely successful studio recording recreated the show. It sold 100,000 copies in over ten countries - 15,000 in the first week of release - and a live album followed. Their fame within France was so great that in 1996 they represented France in the 41st Eurovision Song Contest, singing in Breton.

Finisterres
In 1997, they recorded the album "Finisterres" and again sold 100,000 copies. The music awards ceremony Victoires de la Musique awarded them "Best Traditional Music Album" in 1998. They went on tour in France and played the biggest stages of Paris Le Zénith and Bercy Arena on St Patrick's Day in 1999. But with more than 70 musicians on stage at once, the show was tremendously difficult to put on. In August 2000, the group played at the Festival Interceltique in the stadium of Lorient where Dan announced that it would be the final concert.

Return to solo work
Dan Ar Braz returned to solo work. La mémoire des volets blancs (2001) is a tribute to the deceased friends from his childhood, and is a nostalgic instrumental piece. He performed in another major show at the Stade de France on St Patrick's Day in 2002.

For the following albums, he worked with his friends, singers Clarisse Lavanant, Jean-Jacques Goldman, and Red Cardell. In 2012, with Bagad Kemper, he produced Celebration in Brittany, an album and a tour-unifier which gets closer to the spirit of L'Héritage des Celtes, but centers on Brittany.

In 2015, the album Cornouailles Soundtrack was produced, which takes a more contemplative turn, telling the story of his life in instrumentals that range from "Moon River" and "Oh Shenandoah" to Braz’s own compositions in a style that echoes his musical heroes, The Shadows.

Discography

 * With the band Mor (as a founding-member guitarist)
 * Stations (1972)

 * With Alan Stivell (as a guitarist)
 * Renaissance of the Celtic Harp (1972)
 * Olympia Concert (1972)
 * From Celtic Roots (1973)
 * E Langonned (1974)
 * Live in Dublin (1975)
 * Treman Inis (1976)
 * Before Landing (1977)
 * Again (1993)

 * Solo albums as Dan Ar Braz
 * Douar Nevez (1977)
 * Allez dire à la ville (1978)
 * The Earth's Lament (1979)
 * Acoustic (1981)
 * Music For the Silences To Come / Musique pour les silences à venir (1985)
 * Septembre bleu (1988)
 * Songs (1990)
 * Frontières de sel / Borders of Salt (1991)
 * Rêve de Siam (1992) (OST)
 * Xavier Grall chanté par Dan Ar Braz (1992)
 * Theme for the Green Lands (1994)
 * Kindred Spirit (1995)
 * La Mémoire des volets blancs (2001)
 * Celtiques (2003)
 * À toi et ceux (2004)
 * Frontières de sel (2006) (DVD & CD)
 * Les Perches du Nil (2007)
 * Comptines celtiques et d'ailleurs (2009)
 * Celebration (2012)
 * Célébration d'un héritage (2014) (live album)
 * Cornouailles Soundtrack (2015)

 * Various artists
 * Irish Reels, Jigs, Hornpipes and Airs (1979) (with Duck Baker, Dave Evans, Davey Graham)

 * Solo compilations
 * Islands of memories – Les îles de la mémoire (1992)
 * Made in Breizh (2002)
 * Bretagnes : ici, ailleurs, là-bas (2011)

title: Dan Ar Braz


text:
Fer Corb

Fer Corb ("chariot man"), son of Mug Corb, was, according to medieval Irish legend and historical tradition, a High King of Ireland. He came to power after killing his predecessor, and his father's killer, Irereo, in Ulster. He ruled for eleven years, until he was killed by Irereo's son Connla Cáem. The Lebor Gabála Érenn synchronises his reign with that of Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt (221–205 BC). The chronology of Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn dates his reign to 330–319 BC, the Annals of the Four Masters to 474–463 BC.

title: Fer Corb


text:
Rise Up Like the Sun

Rise Up Like the Sun is a British folk rock album released in 1978 by The Albion Band. The album is in part a collaboration between John Tams on vocals and melodeon and Ashley Hutchings on electric bass. This is not the first album on which the two worked together but it remains the most fulfilling for listeners. To build the sound Hutchings brought in two of his former compatriots from Fairport Convention, Dave Mattacks on drums and tambourine and Simon Nicol on vocals and electric and acoustic guitars. In addition another ex-member of Fairport, Richard Thompson, contributed songs and backing vocals. Having assembled the principal contributors and an ambiance that encouraged their friends to drop in, Hutchings gave Tams the freedom to act as the project's musical director. They were joined by Philip Pickett on shawms, bagpipes, curtals and trumpet, Pete Bullock on synthesiser, piano, clarinet, sax, and organ, Michael Gregory on percussion, Ric Sanders on violin and violectra and Graeme Taylor on electric and acoustic guitars. Kate McGarrigle, Julie Covington, Linda Thompson, Pat Donaldson, Martin Carthy, Andy Fairweather-Low and Dave Bristow make guest appearances.

The album was produced by Tams and Joe Boyd, and engineered by Vic Gamm. It was recorded at Olympic Studio No. 1 and mixed at CBS Studios.

Critical response
The reviews for Rise Up Like the Sun were mostly positive, although opinion was divided on some tracks, such as "The Gresford Disaster". For many, though, the outstanding track of the whole album is "Poor Old Horse", building up from a single fiddle over six minutes to a massed choir with high voices (Kate McGarrigle, Julie Covington and Linda Thompson) and gravelly guitars. "Poor Old Horse" was released as a single in 1978 (Harvest: HAR 5156) and named as "Record of the Week" by the BBC Radio 1's Simon Bates, but made no impact on the charts.

In music magazine surveys, Rise Up Like the Sun often appears among the top three English folk-rock albums of all time, alongside Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief and Shirley Collins' No Roses

This was the last album to be produced by this line-up of the Albion Band. John Tams, Michael Gregory and Graeme Taylor remained in the line-up for one more album, Lark Rise to Candleford, and then went on to form Home Service. Philip Pickett became one of Britain's most respected scholars of medieval music. Ric Sanders went on to join Fairport Convention and both Nicol and Mattacks returned to the Fairport fold.

Side 1

 * 1) "Ragged Heroes" - 3:17
 * 2) "Poor Old Horse" 6:13
 * 3) "Afro Blue" - 3:10
 * 4) "Danse Royale" 1:40
 * 5) "Ampleforth" - 0:45
 * 6) "Lay Me Low" 4:43

Side 2

 * 1) "Time To Ring Some Changes"2:47
 * 2) "House in the Country" 3:02
 * 3) "The Primrose" - 3:16
 * 4) "Gresford Disaster" - 10:45

2003 CD bonus tracks

 * 1) "The Postman's Knock"
 * 2) "Pain and Paradise"
 * 3) "Lay Me Low"
 * 4) "Rainbow Over The Hill"

Track notes

 * 1) "Ragged Heroes" (John Tams): written as a way of announcing that the songs and tunes would be a rallying-call for English folk music. Towards the end, Martin Carthy's counter-melody makes for some very interesting harmonies.
 * 2) "Poor Old Horse" (Traditional sea shanty): usually called "The Dead Horse". The song was sung at the end of the first month on board ship. Sailors would make a horse figure from rags and tar, hoist it to the yard-arm, then cut it loose and let it drift out to sea. The verse about "Sally in the garden" seems to have drifted in from a different unrelated shanty.
 * 3) "Afro Blue/Danse Royale" (Santamaria/Anon medieval): an instrumental track combining Latin-jazz (John Coltrane, 1963) on violin, with a medieval French dance tune on bagpipes. Only the folk-rock band Gryphon had ever attempted anything like this before.
 * 4) "Ampleforth/Lay Me Low" (Trad/Trad): a Northern English sword dance tune, slowed down and played as an air; followed by a Shaker gift song received by Addah Z. Potter of the New Lebanon Church order on 15 April 1838.
 * 5) "Time To Ring Some Changes": Richard Thompson did not record his song until "Small Town Romance" (1984). Although he was present for the recording of "Poor Old Horse", he does not appear on this track.
 * 6) "House in the Country" (Stewart): Maggie Stewart, one of the travelling Stewarts of Blairgowrie, wrote this song about the difficulty of finding a place to live after the First World War.
 * 7) "The Primrose": a nineteenth century polka which had been recorded by Jimmy Shand in the 1950s, while a recording of the tune by Dartmoor melodeon-player Bob Cann appeared on the Topic Records LP "West Country Melodeon" in 1975.
 * 8) "Gresford Disaster": on 22 September 1934 265 colliers died at the Gresford Colliery in North Wales. A. L. Lloyd included a version of the song from Yorkshire in his book "Come All Ye Bold Miners" (1952), while Alan Lomax made a field recording of the song from Mrs. Cosgrove of Newtongrange, Midlothian, Scotland in the 1950s. The Albion Band set the words to the hymn tune "How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds in a Believer's Ear".
 * 9) "The Postman's Knock": a traditional song associated with the Morris dancing tradition at Adderbury in Oxfordshire. The song had previously appeared on Son of Morris On and the Albion Band recorded it again on the album Lark Rise To Candleford (1980).
 * 10) "Pain and Paradise": written by John Tams, inspired by another sea shanty, "Riding on a Donkey."
 * 11) "Lay Me Low": a different sound mix of track 4.
 * 12) "Rainbow Over The Hill": this Richard Thompson song was recorded in 1978 but not released until 1992. Linda Thompson sings the lead.

 * Note: tracks 9 to 12 are bonus tracks that were not on the original vinyl, but were included on the Harvest/EMI cd and the re-mastered Fledg'ling Records issue of the album, in 2003.

Personnel

 * Pete Bullock – synthesizer, piano, organ, saxophone, clarinet
 * Michael Gregory – drums, nakers, tambourine
 * Ashley Hutchings – electric bass
 * Dave Mattacks – drums, tambourine
 * Simon Nicol – guitar, vocals
 * Philip Pickett – bagpipes, shawms, curtals, trumpet
 * Ric Sanders – violin, violectra
 * John Tams – lead vocals, melodeon
 * Graeme Taylor – guitar

Guests

 * Dave Bristow – synthesizer (3)
 * Martin Carthy – vocals (1, 2, 5, 8)
 * Julie Covington – vocals (2, 4)
 * Pat Donaldson – vocals (2, 4)
 * Andy Fairweather-Low – vocals (1, 2, 5)
 * Kate McGarrigle – vocals (2, 4), lead vocals (6)
 * Linda Thompson – vocals (2, 4), lead vocals (12)
 * Richard Thompson – vocals (2, 4)
 * Viola Wills – vocals (10)

title: Rise Up Like the Sun


text:
Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic historical novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified under the Western, or sometimes the anti-Western, genre. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.

Set in the American frontier with a loose historical context, the narrative follows a fictional teenager from Tennessee referred to as "the kid", with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred American Indians and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, sadistic pleasure, and eventually out of nihilistic habit. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a physically massive, highly educated, preternaturally skilled member of the gang with pale and hairless skin who takes extreme sadistic pleasure in the destruction and domination of whatever he encounters, including children and docile animals.

Although the novel initially received lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become highly acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy's magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels of all time. Some have labelled it the Great American Novel. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to adapt the novel into a film, New Regency is currently set to produce a feature film based on the novel.

Plot
The novel tells the story of a teenaged runaway referred to only as "the kid", who was born in Tennessee during the famously active Leonids meteor shower of 1833. He first meets the enormous, pale, hairless Judge Holden at a religious revival in a tent in Nacogdoches, Texas, at which Holden falsely accuses the preacher of raping children and goats, inciting the audience to attack him.

After a violent encounter with a bartender that establishes the kid as a formidable fighter, he joins a party of ill-equipped U.S. Army irregulars on a filibustering mission led by a Captain White. White's group is overwhelmed by a Comanche raiding party, and few of them survive. Arrested as a filibuster in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his acquaintance Toadvine tells the authorities they will make useful Indian hunters. They join John Joel Glanton and his gang, among them Holden, and the bulk of the novel is devoted to detailing their activities and conversations. Though originally tasked with protecting locals from marauding Apaches, the gang devolves into the outright murder of unthreatening Indians, unprotected Mexican villages, and eventually even Mexican soldiers and anyone else who crosses their path, collecting the scalps of Indians to turn in for money whilst looting and massacring the Mexican forces.

According to the kid's new companion Ben Tobin, an "ex-priest", the Glanton gang first met Judge Holden while fleeing for their lives from a much larger Apache group. In the middle of a blasted desert, they found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemingly was waiting for and expecting the gang. They agreed to follow his leadership, and he took them to an extinct volcano where he instructed them on how to manufacture gunpowder with the available resources, enough to give them the advantage against the Apaches. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin tells the kid that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge at some point before joining the Glanton gang.

After months of marauding and scalp hunting, the gang crosses into the Mexican Cession, where they eventually set up a systematic and brutal robbing operation at a ferry on the Colorado River at Yuma, Arizona. Local Yuma (Quechan) Indians are at first approached to help the gang wrest control of the ferry from its original owners, but Glanton's gang betrays and slaughters them and the passengers so they can plunder the ferry and frame the Indians for the attack. After a while, the Yumas vengefully attack and kill most of the gang in a second wave. The kid, Toadvine, and Tobin are among the survivors who flee into the desert, though the kid takes an arrow in the leg. The kid and Tobin head west, and come across Holden, who first negotiates, then threatens them for their gun and possessions. Holden shoots Tobin in the neck, and the wounded pair hide among bones by a desert creek. Tobin repeatedly urges the kid to fire upon Holden. The kid does so, but misses his mark.

The survivors continue their travels, ending up in San Diego, California. The kid is separated from Tobin and is subsequently imprisoned. Holden visits the kid in jail, and tells him that he has told the jailers "the truth": that the kid alone was responsible for the end of the Glanton gang. The kid is released on recognizance and seeks a doctor to treat his wound. While recovering from the effects of anesthesia, he hallucinates a visit from Holden along with a curious man who forges coins, and learns what Holden is judge of, and that "the night does not end". The kid recovers and seeks out Tobin, with no luck. He makes his way to Los Angeles, where Toadvine and another member of the Glanton gang, David Brown, were hanged for their crimes.

In 1878, the kid, now in his mid-40s and referred to as "the man", makes his way to Fort Griffin, Texas. At a saloon he meets Holden, who seems not to have aged in the intervening years. Holden calls the man "the last of the true", and the pair talk. Holden declares that the man has arrived at the saloon for "the dance" – the dance of violence, war, and bloodshed that the judge had so often praised. The man disputes Holden's ideas and, noting the performing bear at the saloon, states that "even a dumb animal can dance". When the man goes to an outhouse under another meteor shower shortly afterwards, he runs into the naked Holden, who holds him to his chest and shuts the door. Later, two men open the door to the outhouse and gaze in awe and horror at what they see. The last paragraph finds the judge back in the saloon, dancing and playing the fiddle, saying that he never sleeps and will never die.

In the epilogue, a man is augering lines of holes across the prairie, perhaps for fence posts. The man sparks a fire in each of the holes, and an assortment of wanderers trails behind him.

Major characters

 * The kid: The novel's anti-heroic protagonist or pseudo-protagonist, the kid is an illiterate Tennessean whose mother died in childbirth. At 14, he flees from his father to Texas. He is said to have a disposition for violence and is involved in vicious actions throughout. He takes up inherently violent professions, specifically being recruited by violent criminals including Captain White, and later by Glanton and his gang, thereby securing release from a prison in Chihuahua, Mexico. The kid takes part in many of the Glanton gang's scalp-hunting rampages, but gradually displays a moral fiber that ultimately puts him at odds with the Judge. "The kid" is later as an adult referred to as "the man".
 * Judge Holden, or "the judge": A huge, pale and hairless man who often seems almost mythical or supernatural. He is a polyglot and polymath and a keen examiner and recorder of the natural world. He is extremely violent and deviant. He is said to have accompanied Glanton's gang since they found him sitting alone on a rock in the middle of the desert and he saved them from pursuing Apaches. It is hinted that he and Glanton have some manner of pact. He gradually becomes the antagonist to the kid after the dissolution of Glanton's gang, occasionally having brief reunions with the kid. Unlike the rest of the gang, Holden is socially refined and remarkably well educated; however, he perceives the world as ultimately violent, fatalistic, and liable to an endless cycle of bloody conquest, with human nature and autonomy defined by the will to violence; he asserts, ultimately, that "War is god." He is based partly on the historical character of Judge Holden.
 * John Joel Glanton, or simply "Glanton": The American leader, or "captain", of a gang of scalphunters who murder Indians and Mexican civilians and military alike. His history and appearance are not clarified except that he is physically small with black hair and has a wife and child in Texas. He is a clever strategist. His last major action is to take control of a profitable Colorado River ferry, which ultimately leads to an ambush by Yuma Indians in which he is killed. He is based partly on the historical character of John Joel Glanton.
 * Louis Toadvine, or simply "Toadvine": A seasoned outlaw with whom the kid brawls and then burns down a hotel. Toadvine has no ears and his forehead is branded with the letters H and T (horse thief) and F (felon). He reappears unexpectedly as a cellmate of the kid in the Chihuahua prison. From here he mendaciously negotiates the release of himself and the kid and one other inmate into Glanton's gang. Toadvine is not as depraved as some of the gang, questioning the killing of innocents, but is nonetheless a violent criminal. He is hanged in Los Angeles alongside David Brown.
 * Ben Tobin, "the priest", or "the ex-priest": A member of the gang and formerly a novice of the Society of Jesus. Tobin remains deeply religious. He feels an apparently friend-like bond with the kid and abhors the judge and his philosophy. He and the judge gradually become great spiritual enemies. He survives the Yuma massacre of Glanton's gang, but is shot in the neck by the judge. He is last seen after he arrives in San Diego with the kid and goes off on his own to look for a doctor.

Other recurring characters

 * Captain White, or "the captain": An ex-professional soldier and American supremacist who believes that Mexico is a lawless nation destined to be conquered by the United States. Captain White leads a patchwork company of militants into Mexico along with the recently recruited "Kid". After weeks of travel through the harsh Mexican desert, the company is ambushed by a Comanche war party. Captain White makes his escape with a few "officers" but is ultimately caught, beheaded, and subsequently has his head "pickled".
 * Bathcat, or "the vandiemenlander": Born in Wales, Bathcat went to Van Diemen's Land to hunt Aborigines. He has three fingers on his right hand. Aside from a necklace of ears, his most notable trait is a number tattooed on the inside of his forearm, suggesting that he may have been sent to the colony as a convict. He is killed by Native Americans during their travels through Pimería Alta; a fate that was foretold during his introduction.
 * David Brown or simply "Brown": A member of the gang who wears a necklace of human ears - likely taken from Bathcat's corpse. He is arrested in San Diego and Glanton seems especially concerned to see him released. He brings about his own release but does not return to the gang before the Yuma massacre. He is hanged with Toadvine in Los Angeles.
 * James Robert Bell, or "the idiot": A mentally challenged man who becomes affiliated with the Glanton gang after his brother, Cloyce joins. Before the brothers joined, Cloyce would keep the idiot in a cage so people could pay money to see him. He's also regularly shown chewing on his own feces. The judge takes a liking to the idiot, as he can be easy to manipulate. The judge would later have the idiot chained like a dog and make him hold his weapons. The judge later uses the idiot to try to kill both the kid and Tobin. By the end of the novel, the judge is not seen with the idiot, leaving his fate like many in the novel, unknown.
 * John Jackson: "John Jackson" is a name shared by two men in Glanton's gang – one black and one white – who detest one another and whose tensions frequently rise when in each other's presence. After trying to drive the black Jackson away from a campfire with a threat of violence, "White Jackson" is decapitated. "Black Jackson" assumes an integral role in the gang. While still referred to by numerous slurs, Jackson is nonetheless treated as part of a "body" that cannot have any part killed or violated, as Judge Holden goes to great lengths to rescue him after a confrontation on a mountain pass.

Violence

A major theme is the warlike nature of man. Critic Harold Bloom praised Blood Meridian as one of the best 20th century American novels, "worthy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick," but admitted that his "first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because [he] flinched from the overwhelming carnage".

Caryn James of The New York Times argued that the novel's violence was a "slap in the face" to modern readers cut off from brutality. Terrence Morgan thought the effect of the violence initially shocking but then waned until the reader was desensitized. Billy J. Stratton of Arizona Quarterly contends that the brutality is the primary mechanism through which McCarthy challenges the "oppositional structure" of the conventional narrative of the Old West; "[R]eaders encounter characters that are often depicted as more animal than human in their behaviors, participating in a ruthless struggle for fortune and power. It is the absence of a recognizable heroic character along with the negation of the Eurocentric oppositions that McCarthy's deployment of animal imagery is meant to illuminate."

James D. Lilley argues that many critics struggle with the fact that McCarthy does not use violence for "jury-rigged, symbolic plot resolutions ... In McCarthy's work, violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else." In her aforementioned review, Caryn James noted that McCarthy depicts characters of all backgrounds as evil, in contrast to contemporary "revisionist theories that make white men the villains and Indians the victims."

Epigraphs

Three epigraphs open the book: quotations from French writer Paul Valéry, from German Christian mystic Jakob Böhme, and a 1982 news clipping from the Yuma Sun reporting the claim of members of an Ethiopian archeological excavation that a fossilized skull three hundred millennia old seemed to have been scalped. Regarding the meaning of the epigraphs, David H. Evans writes that

"[t]he taking of scalps, as McCarthy's third epigraph suggests, enjoys a profound antiquity, one coterminous with, perhaps, the beginnings of the species Homo sapiens."

Ending
The narrative closes with ambiguity pertaining to the final state of the kid, or the man. Since the book portrays violence in explicit detail, this allusive portrayal has caused comment. Given Judge Holden's history and other details in the text, he presumably rapes the man before killing him. Alternatively, perhaps the point is that readers can never know.

Hell
David Vann argues that the setting of the American southwest which the Gang traverses is representative of hell. Vann claims that the Judge's kicking of a head is an allusion to Dante's similar action in the Inferno.

Gnosticism
The second of the three epigraphs which introduce the novel, taken from the Christian theosophist Jakob Böhme, has incited varied discussion. The quote from Boehme is: "It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness."

No specific conclusions have been reached about its interpretation nor relevance to the novel. Critics agree that there are Gnostic elements in Blood Meridian, but they disagree on the precise meaning and implication of those elements.

Leo Daugherty argues that "Gnostic thought is central to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian", (Daugherty, 122) specifically the Persian-Zoroastrian-Manichean branch of Gnosticism. He describes the novel as a "rare coupling of Gnostic 'ideology' with the 'affect' of Hellenic tragedy by means of depicting how power works in the making and erasing of culture, and of what the human condition amounts to when a person opposes that power and thence gets introduced to fate." Daugherty sees Holden as an archon and the kid as a "failed pneuma." He says that the kid feels a "spark of the alien divine."

Daugherty further contends that the violence of the novel can best be understood through a Gnostic lens. "Evil" as defined by the Gnostics was a far larger, more pervasive presence in human life than the rather tame and "domesticated" Satan of Christianity. As Daugherty writes, "For [Gnostics], evil was simply everything that is, with the exception of bits of spirit imprisoned here. And what they saw is what we see in the world of Blood Meridian."

However, Barcley Owens argues that while there are undoubtedly Gnostic qualities to the novel, Daugherty's arguments are "ultimately unsuccessful," because Daugherty fails to adequately address the pervasive violence and because he overstates the kid's goodness.

Theodicy
Douglas Canfield asserts that theodicy is the central theme of Blood Meridian. James Wood took a similar position, recognizing as a recurrent theme in the novel the issue of the general justification of metaphysical goodness in the presence of evil. Chris Dacus expressed his preference for discussing the theme of theodicy in its eschatological terms in comparison to the theological scene of the last judgment. This preference for reading theodicy as an eschatological theme was further affirmed by Harold Bloom in his recurrent phrase of referring to the novel as "The Authentic Apocalyptic Novel."

Writing

McCarthy began writing Blood Meridian in the mid-1970s. In a letter sent around 1979 he said that he had not touched Blood Meridian in six months out of frustration. Nonetheless, significant parts of the final book were written in one go, "including the astonishing 'legion of horribles' passage".

McCarthy worked on the novel while living on the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellows grant. It was his first attempt at a western and his first novel set in the Southwestern United States, a change from the Appalachian settings of his earlier work.

In 1974, McCarthy moved from his native Tennessee to El Paso, Texas, to immerse himself in the culture and geography of the American Southwest. He taught himself Spanish, which many of the characters of Blood Meridian speak. McCarthy conducted considerable research to write the book. Critics have repeatedly demonstrated that even brief and seemingly inconsequential passages of Blood Meridian rely on historical evidence. The book has been described as "as close to history as novels generally get".

The Glanton gang segments are based on Samuel Chamberlain's account of the group in his memoir My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue. Chamberlain rode with John Joel Glanton and his company between 1849 and 1850. Judge Holden is described in Chamberlain's account but is otherwise unknown. Chamberlain writes:

McCarthy's judge was added to his manuscript in the late 1970s, a "grotesque patchwork of up-river Kurtz and Milton's Satan" and Chamberlain's account.

McCarthy physically retraced the Glanton Gang's path through Mexico multiple times, and noted topography and fauna. He studied such topics as homemade gunpowder to accurately depict the judge's creation from volcanic rock.

Style
McCarthy's writing style involves many unusual or archaic words, dialogue in Spanish, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to signal most contractions. McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that he preferred "simple declarative sentences" and that he used capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons. He believed there was no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks". The New York Times described McCarthy's prose in Blood Meridian as "Faulknerian". Describing events of extreme violence, McCarthy's prose is sparse yet expansive, with an often biblical quality and frequent religious references.

Reception and reevaluation
Blood Meridian initially received little recognition, but has since been recognized as a masterpiece and one of the greatest works of American literature. Some have called it the Great American Novel. American literary critic Harold Bloom praised Blood Meridian as one of the 20th century's finest novels. Aleksandar Hemon has called it "possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years". David Foster Wallace named it one of the five most underappreciated American novels since 1960 and "[p]robably the most horrifying book of this [20th] century, at least [in] fiction."

Time magazine included Blood Meridian in its "Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". In 2010 The New York Times conducted a poll of writers and critics regarding the most important works in American fiction from the previous 25 years, and Blood Meridian was a runner-up.

Literary significance
There has been no consensus in the interpretation of the novel. Americanist Dana Phillips said that the work "seems designed to elude interpretation". One scholar has described Blood Meridian as:"Lyrical at times, at others simply archaic and recondite, at still others barely literate: the dissociative style of Blood Meridian defies accommodation to conventional assumptions. And that's the point." Nonetheless, academics and critics have suggested that Blood Meridian is nihilistic or strongly moral, a satire of the western genre or a savage indictment of Manifest Destiny. Harold Bloom called it "the ultimate western". J. Douglas Canfield described it as "a grotesque Bildungsroman in which we are denied access to the protagonist's consciousness almost entirely". Richard Selzer declared that McCarthy "is a genius – also probably somewhat insane." Critic Steven Shaviro wrote:

"In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian. Both are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness. Both manifest a sublime visionary power that is matched only by still more ferocious irony. Both savagely explode the American dream of manifest destiny of racial domination and endless imperial expansion. But if anything, McCarthy writes with a yet more terrible clarity than does Melville."

- Steven Shaviro

Attempted film adaptations

Since the novel's release many have noted its cinematic potential. The New York Times' 1985 review noted that the novel depicted "scenes that might have come off a movie screen". There have been attempts to create a motion picture adaptation of Blood Meridian, but all have failed during the development or pre-production stages. A common perception is that the story is "unfilmable" due to its unrelenting violence and dark tone. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2009 McCarthy denied this notion, with his perspective being that it would be "very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary."

Screenwriter Steve Tesich first adapted Blood Meridian into a screenplay in 1995. In the late 1990s, Tommy Lee Jones acquired the film adaptation rights to the story and subsequently rewrote Tesich's screenplay with the idea of directing and playing a role in it. The production could not move forward due to film studios avoiding the project's overall violence.

Following the end of production for Kingdom of Heaven in 2004, screenwriter William Monahan and director Ridley Scott entered discussions with producer Scott Rudin for adapting Blood Meridian with Paramount Pictures financing. In a 2008 interview with Eclipse Magazine Scott confirmed that the screenplay had been written, but that the extensive violence was proving to be a challenge for film standards. This later led to Scott and Monahan leaving the project, resulting in another abandoned adaptation.

By early 2011, James Franco was considering adapting Blood Meridian, along with a number of other William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy novels. After being persuaded by Andrew Dominik to adapt the novel, Franco shot 25 minutes of test footage starring Scott Glenn, Mark Pellegrino, Luke Perry, and Dave Franco. For undisclosed reasons, Rudin denied further production of the film. On May 5, 2016, Variety revealed that Franco was negotiating with Rudin to write and direct an adaptation to be brought to the Marché du Film, starring Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan, and Vincent D'Onofrio. However, it was reported later that day that the project dissolved due to issues with the film rights.

In 2023, Deadline reported that New Regency is adapting Blood Meridian as a feature film. John Hillcoat, who previously directed an adaptation of McCarthy's novel The Road, is set to direct. Alongside his son John Francis, McCarthy was set to serve as executive producer of the film before his death on June 13, 2023. John Logan was later announced to be adapting the story.

title: Blood Meridian