2 replies to this topic

[The Shark]

After listening to BBC Radio 4, I found this blog entry:

Thursday, 3 November 2011
On skyfall
A correspondent from BBC Radio 4's Front Row calls to ask whether I have any views about the name of the new James Bond movie, Skyfall. Had I ever heard the word before?

I certainly had. Thanks to various children, I am aware of characters in Transformers universes with this name, and I recall an adventure fantasy from the 1980s which had a planet called Skyfall. And there was a striking use by W H Auden, in the charade (his first dramatic work) he wrote in 1928 and dedicated to Cecil Day Lewis, 'Paid on Both Sides', which has the vivid lines:

Though heart fears all heart cries for, rebuffs with mortal beat
Skyfall, the legs sucked under, adder's bite.

But apart from this, the coinage seems a somewhat predictable compound. Other words ending in fall in English are unremarkable - rainfall, snowfall, waterfall, and suchlike, alongside figurative extensions such as pitfall, landfall, and shortfall. It does lend itself to cosmic invention, though: a quick search on Google produces starfall, moonfall, planetfall, sunfall, and others. So skyfall is in good company. But we'll have to wait and see what motivates the title in this case.

I'm wondering if it's 'James Bond meets Chicken Licken'. You remember him? An acorn falls on his head, and he thinks the sky is falling down so he rushes off to tell the king? Maybe the new Bond baddy is Foxy Loxy in disguise.

http://david-crystal...on-skyfall.html

This was posted by David Crystal, the lexicographer who was called by Mark Lawson on yesterday's Front Row. You can listen to it here on the BBC iPlayer, from around 24 minutes in.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...Holmes_Skyfall/

An interesting fact - counting A VIEW TO A KILL and DIE ANOTHER DAY, it will the third Bond title to have some forbearance in a song or poem.

Cumberland hunting song titled "D'Ye Ken John Peel" - written by John Woodcock Graves in 1820.

"From the drag to the chase
from the chase to the view
from the view to a death
in the morning..."

Ian Fleming simply modified "from the view to a death" into "From a View to a Kill."

"Into My Heart an Air That Kills" from A.E. Houseman's poem cycle - A Shropshire Lad

"But since the man that runs away / Lives to die another day".

Neil Purvis & Robert Wade almost quote the last line ad verbatim in Bond's confrontation with Graves/Moon.

[Harmsway]

Interesting.

[Captain Tightpants]

I'm not so sure. I'm an English teacher, and so this is the meaning that I'm reading into the poem:

Though heart fears all heart cries for, rebuffs with mortal beat
Skyfall, the legs sucked under, adder's bite.

"Though heart fears all heart cries for" - The heart is afraid of getting what it wants.

"rebuffs with mortal beat" - It puts aside that fear; the desire is greater than the fear, because it is spurred on by its own mortality.

"Skyfall, the legs sucked under, adder's bite" - falling skies, quicksand, and the venom of a snake bite; this comes across as being thrown off-balance as everything around the speaker is changed for good.

Paid On Both Sides is the story of two warring families that find a truce when one marries into the other. But the petty egoes of the older generations lead to the ceasefire falling apart - it's almost an alternative ending to Romeo and Juliet, where the Montagues and Capulets finally end their feud with the marriage of their children, but the peace is short-lived when someone (probably Tybalt) cannot take the idea of truce. So this extract really comes across as part of a love poem as one of the characters realises they have developed feelings for the other, and is just as surprised to realise it as everyone else is.

It's an interesting aside, but I don't think it will have much to do with the film.