You’ll remember I spoke about how each episode of Finding Manuland looks at Mana, as the energy we exchange, as a source — the function of being human; the linguistic aspect, the miracle of MN being immanent in so many words we use, and places we go, and the founder figures, and so much else beside, and as an organising focus for this journey; and the third element, the journeying element, of every Finding Manuland episode. In the last episode I brought you on a quick survey of Ireland and Britain, and now this is the Western European Corridor atlas survey. The idea here is: I’ve got hundreds of papers and journeys to talk to you about. In each of these podcasts will be immanent those three elements — Mana, language, and journeying. These are the introductory episodes, just to give you a flavour of what is to come next. Maing: Where the Project Got Its Name So, the Western European Corridor. This is the drive home from Ukraine in the autumn of 2021 — or rather, the drive back to Ukraine. Now we cross the continent, and the map starts to move under us. This corridor is where the project Finding Manuland got its name. On a drive back to my diplomatic posting, just prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — I was driving back to my diplomatic posting in Dnipro, in the autumn of 2021, at the very start of a three-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre run from my home near Emain Macha in Ireland to Dnipro — I was already noticing that my route threaded through MN- and M-A-I-N-sounding place-names, when I followed the word Maing off the satnav into a village in northern France. And there it was, on the side of a shed: Manuland. It was getting late. I photographed the shed. The next morning I doubled back and, without quite deciding to, invented the method I have used ever since. So when I go to a place on this journey, I start at the church, or somehow in the centre of a village. I don’t know what I’m looking for, why I’m there, or if I’ll find anything. And that day in Maing, I ran in ever-increasing circles out from it, around the village, up one street and down the next, until I reached the edge of town and a cobbled road — an ancient road — climbing up a hill. Off the hill sat a mound with a herdsman on it, who, when I reached him, pointed me towards Cassels, the old capital of the Menapii, the same Manannán-worshipping sea tribe, now inland in France. I set off for Cassels, and that circling, born in Maing, is the recurring shape — like a chariot wheel — the recurring shape of every journey since. The exchange of Mana with the herdsman; a sound heard in a place-name — the language; a hand on actual ground — the journeying. All three elements were already there, in what would have been a nondescript but altogether beautiful French village I would never have stopped in. And the name, Manuland, taken off a shed. The Main Corridor: Goethe, Herder, and the Making of a National Culture The corridor is a string of MN-sounding names: Mons, Mainz, Frankfurt-on-Main. I stopped along it at Goethe’s house in Frankfurt — occupied by the French when Goethe was a child. And it was at that moment that the great Herder decided: we must create a national culture, a German culture. We must unite the German tribes, by finding our Shakespeare, by creating our Shakespeare, our culture. Herder wrote, as I have said in previous episodes, which you will see and we will come back to — he said, in 1777: where is our Shakespeare? We need a Shakespeare, like England has a Shakespeare, to unite around. And Goethe — whose house was literally hosting a French occupying general, who would eat and drink and live in that house — Goethe then became Germany’s Shakespeare. And the Grimm Brothers then became the great linguists, the first of the great philologists and linguists of the Germanic languages, and collected folk tales, and looked at the language and the meanings inside them. And then, of course, Wagner, 90 years later. The tales which Tacitus had told about the Germans, and Mannus, the founder of the Germanic peoples, and his three sons, became operas, and became stories — like Faust, like The Sorrows of Young Werther — which Goethe and Herder and so many great writers used to unite around, and create the first unified Germany. And that model of nation-state formation, around national cultures grounded in folklore, song, and culture — that is part of the heritage Finding Manuland uses to explore all the spaces between Ireland and India, which I archetype as Manuland. The Museums: Halle, Wrocław, and Enheduanna in Brussels The museums on that journey are where the moon and its measuring keep surfacing in bronze — in Halle, in Wrocław in Poland, where in October 2021 I photographed a Bronze Age sun-chariot. In February 2022, in the last weeks before the full-scale invasion, driving back, leaving Ukraine with my cat, anticipating the invasion, I stood in Halle, in the great modern museum there. And in the dusty corner of a museum in Brussels, I found the thread: a cuneiform tablet, in a dusty corner, holding Enheduanna’s hymn to the moon god Nanna. The first named author, from 2400 BCE — the first named author in human history, already signing her name: a moon priestess, MN. Her alabaster, still, after 4,000 years, as luminescent as a full moon. And we will go to the Penn Museum in Pennsylvania — Penn, the great Ivy League university where my grandfather studied. We will go there, and that is where Enheduanna’s luminescent disc, which was created in her own lifetime, now abides. I photographed her, and the cuneiform text, almost by chance, and she turned out to be a doorway to Mesopotamia, which is very, very far to the east, and somewhere we’re going. Domburg and Nehalennia: The Menapii’s Last Surprise The Menapii have one more surprise waiting for us, on their own coast. In January 1647, a storm stripped the dunes at Domburg, on the Dutch island of Walcheren, in the old country of the Menapii, and exposed dozens of Roman altars to a goddess nobody had heard of: Nehalennia, a protectress of sea traders. Within weeks, a Leiden scholar, Boxhorn, responded — and in his pamphlet of the same year, he argued something bigger: that Greek, Latin, and the Germanic tongues descend from one older language, which he called Scythian. Scythia: ancient Ukraine. The common origin we now know from the analysis of ancient DNA, published in our species’ preeminent journals. I want to walk that dune-front with Boxhorn’s pamphlet in hand and in mind, and bring you on that journey. There we will exchange Mana with him, and with the first intimations that our entire Indo-European culture, from Ireland to India, emanates from Scythia — ancient Ukraine. The Mediolanon Towns and the LG Shadow Axis And deeper into France waits a field of MN names, from a map in my own notes: the Mediolanon towns, the Celtic middle-places — one of which, Châteaumeillant, some historians read as a meeting place for Druids. The corridor keeps going into country I’ve not yet crossed, but we will cross it together, and we will visit the little museums and the places, and we will see if we can feel the Mana. Sometimes you go places and you feel nothing. The lunar calendar sites all wait: the wooden ring at Goseck, which I did visit; the bronze Coligny calendar plate, which no one has yet fully deciphered, with its months cut into metal — month and measure and menses, all one word. So do the towns strung along a second sound I’m following: the LG of Lugus and Lug — Lyon, Léon, Loudoun, Carlisle. It’s a lead, not yet a result. And Lug himself — solar, LG, the founder slot — is one of the great gods of Irish mythology. Grail Country: From Manannán’s Cauldron to Monty Python The grail country of Chrétien de Troyes waits too, where Manannán’s Cauldron of Plenty surfaces centuries later as a French romance vessel — one and the same Indo-European bowl, which the great Indo-Europeanist John Carey demonstrates: the Grail emanates from Irish mythological texts, and a collection of them, which got into the hands of Philip of Alsace, who then gave it to Chrétien de Troyes, via Belgic migrants in southwest Wales, in today’s Pembrokeshire. And from there into European literature and art, from Chrétien de Troyes all the way up to Monty Python — MN in Monty Python. But we won’t dwell too much on certain MNs; others we will just take notice of. Tacitus Country, Lake Nemi, and Dumézil And in Germany — MN — the roads bend through the Tacitus country, which I want to visit knowingly, and with intention, mens rea: the Saxon lands whose three nations he derives from the sons of Mannus; and Saxony-Anhalt, the princely mounds around the Nebra find-spot. I want to go back there and explore properly. And in Italy, at Ariccia in the Alban Hills, Rome kept a figure the great comparativist Georges Dumézil — who is a very important influence and character in these Finding Manuland tales — could not resist setting beside Manu: Manius Egerius, founder of the grove cult of Diana — DN — at Lake Nemi — NM — ancestor of the proverbial multitude of the Manii, with the manes, the ancestral dead, gathered around the same MN sound. The grove of the Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, waits on that lake. The Danube Road: The First Road West out of Ukraine The Danube road: the first road west out of Ukraine, down the great DN river — Don, Donets, Dnieper, Dniester, Danube — through the copper and gold of Old Europe. Before we reach Greece, adjust your mental map once more, because the road that matters runs along a river our schooling never made us look at. It is the DN river sound at its grandest. No one can resolve whether the name emanates from the north or the south; you may guess by now where I believe the name spread from. And it was the first road west — the corridor by which the ho
