This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009)

Upper- and lower-case versions of the thorn character

Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs ("giant") in the Scandinavian rune poems, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being Thurisaz.

It has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative [θ], like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative [ð], like th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth (Ð, ð), however the pronunciation of words beginning with a þ often depends on that word's position within a sentence, being pronounced [θ] if the word is at the beginning of a sentence but [ð] otherwise. Þ in modern Icelandic also has a voiceless allophone [θ], which occurs in certain positions within a phrase.

In its typography, the thorn is one of the few characters in a Latin-derived alphabet whose modern lower-case form has greater height than the capital in its normal (roman), non-italic form.

Uses[link]

English[link]

Old English[link]

The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, as was ð; but, unlike ð, thorn remained in common use through most of the Middle English period. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe. This sound was regularly realized in Old English as the voiced fricative [ð] between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of [ð] in phonetic alphabets is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the ascender crossed (Ꝥ) was a popular abbreviation for the word that.

Middle and Early Modern English[link]

The modern digraph th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of thorn grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old wynn (Ƿ, ƿ), which had fallen out of use by 1300) and, in some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th century manuscript of The Boke of Margery Kempe, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from the letter Y. By this stage th was predominant, however, and the usage of thorn was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In William Caxton's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviated the, written with a thorn and a superscript E. This was the longest-lived usage, though the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous, leading to the common 'ye' as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this is that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, and thorn did not. The first printing of the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 used the Y form of thorn with a superscript E in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29. It also used a similar form with a superscript T, which was an abbreviated that, in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by the or that, respectively.

Abbreviations[link]

The following were abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:

• ME ye.png – (þ^e) a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
• ME that.png – (þ^t) a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
• ME thou.png – (þ^u) a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou (which was written early on as þu or þou)
• (y^s) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
• EME ye.svg – (y^e) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
• – (y^t) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that

An example of the last vestige of the letter thorn in the English language.

Modern English[link]

Thorn in the form of a "Y" survives to this day in pseudo-archaic usages, particularly the stock prefix "Ye olde". The definite article spelled with "Y" for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced /jiː/ or mistaken for the archaic nominative case of the second person plural familiar, "ye".

A handwritten form of thorn that was similar to the letter "y" in appearance with a small "e" written above it as an abbreviation for "the" was common in early Modern English. This can still be seen in reprints of the 1611 edition of the King James Version of the Bible in places such as Romans 15:29, or in the Mayflower Compact. The word of course was never pronounced with a "y" sound, even when so written.

Icelandic[link]

The Icelandic language is the only living language to retain the letter thorn (in Icelandic; þ, pronounced þoddn, [θ̠ɔtn̥]) in common usage. The letter is the 30th in the Icelandic alphabet and never appears at the end of a word. Its pronunciation has not varied much, but in earlier times þ was sometimes used instead of ð as in the word "verþa" which is verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic. Þ was originally taken from the runic alphabet and is described in the First Grammatical Treatise:

Constructed languages[link]

The thorn is a letter of the alphabet of the Talossan language, in which it may also be seen represented (for convenience) by the digraph TG.

Computing codes[link]

Computer keyboarding[link]

The þ character is accessible using AltGr+t on a modern US-International keyboard

Thorn can be typed on a normal QWERTY keyboard using various system dependent methods. Thorn may also be accessible by copy-and-pasting from a character map, through changing the keyboard layout or through a compose key.

Variants[link]

A thorn with a stroke on the ascender (Ꝥꝥ) was used in English (see the section on usage).

A thorn with a stroke on the descender also exists (Ꝧꝧ). The capital form is at codepoint U+A766, and the minuscule form is at codepoint U+A767.

See also[link]

• Pronunciation of English th
• Sho (letter)
• Eth

References[link]

• Freeborn, Dennis (1992) From Old English to Standard English. London: Macmillan

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Þ

• Everson, Michael, All about the letter þorn (blog), http://þorn.info/ .
•         , "On the status of the Latin letter þorn and of its sorting order", Standards (essay), Evertype, http://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/thorn.html .
• "Why is 'ye' used instead of 'the' in antique English?", Oxford English Dictionary's FAQ, Ask Oxford, http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutspelling/ye ^{[dead link]}
• Thorn and Eth: how to get them right, Briem, http://briem.net/ .
• þ.com, http://þ.com/ .

Bruno Schulz (July 12, 1892 – November 19, 1942) was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher born to Jewish parents,^[1] and regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobych, in the province of Galicia then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and spent most of his life there. He was killed by a German Nazi officer.

Biography[link]

Bruno Schulz was the son of cloth merchant Jakub and Henrietta Schulz née Kuhmerker.^[2] At a very early age, he developed an interest in the arts. He attended school in Drohobych from 1902 to 1910, after which he studied architecture at Lviv Polytechnic. His studies were interrupted by illness in 1911 but he resumed them in 1913 after two years of convalescence. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna.

After World War I, the region of Galicia, which included Drohobych, returned to Poland. Schulz taught drawing in a Polish school from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a teacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole source of income.^[3]

Schulz developed his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities; a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, immersed in Jewish culture, yet unfamiliar with the Yiddish language.^[4] Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Second Polish Republic, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit; uneventful and enclosed.

Schulz was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. However, his aspirations were refreshed when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his family and fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction. They were published as The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) in 1934. In English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of its chapters. The Cinnamon Shops was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were illustrated by Schulz; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations were often left out or poorly reproduced. In 1936 he helped his fiancée, Józefina Szelińska, translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.

In 1939, after the Nazi–Soviet invasion of Poland in World War II, Drohobych was occupied by the Soviet Union. Schulz is known to have been working on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of the manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew, he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobych, but was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Nazi Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobych. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was walking home through the "Aryan quarter" with a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther.^[5][6] Günther was a rival of Landau, who had killed Günther's "personal Jew". Subsequently, Schulz' mural was painted over and forgotten for a long time to come.

Writings[link]

Schulz's body of written work is small; The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and a few other compositions that the author did not add to the first edition of his short story collection. A collection of Schulz's letters was published in Polish in 1975, entitled The Book of Letters, as well as a number of critical essays that Schulz wrote for various newspapers. Several of Schulz's works have been lost, including short stories from the early 1940s that the author had sent to be published in magazines, and his final, unfinished novel, The Messiah.
Both books were featured in Penguin's series "Writers from the Other Europe" from the 1970s. Philip Roth was the general editor, and the series included authors such as Danilo Kiš, Tadeusz Borowski, Jiří Weil, and Milan Kundera among others.^[7]

Translations[link]

An edition of Schulz's stories was published in 1957, leading to French, German, and later English translations.

• The Street of Crocodiles. New York: Walker and Company, 1963. (A translation by Celina Wieniewska of Sklepy Cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops).)
• Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass New York: Penguin, 1988. (A translation by Celina Wieniewska of Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, with an introduction by John Updike.) ISBN 0-14-005272-0
• The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz. New York: Walker and Company, 1989. (Combination of the prior two collections.) ISBN 0-8027-1091-3

Film adaptations[link]

Schulz's work has provided the basis for two films. Wojciech Has' The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973) draws from a dozen of his stories and recreates the dreamlike quality of his writings. A 21 minute, stop-motion, animated 1986 film, Street of Crocodiles, by the Quay Brothers, was inspired by Schulz's writing.

Theatrical adaptations[link]

In 1992, an experimental theatre piece based on The Street of Crocodiles was conceived and directed by Simon McBurney and produced by Theatre de Complicite in collaboration with the National Theatre in London. A highly complex interweaving of image, movement, text, puppetry, object manipulation, naturalistic and stylised performance underscored by music from Alfred Schnittke, Vladimir Martynov drew on Schulz's stories, his letters and biography. It received six Olivier Award nominations (1992) after its initial run, and was revived four times in London in the years that followed influencing a whole generation of British theatre makers. It subsequently played to audiences and festivals all over the world such as Quebec (Prix du Festival 1994), Moscow, Munich (teatre der Welt 1994), Villnius and many other countries. It was last revived in 1998 when it played in New York (Lincoln Centre Festival) and other cities in the United States, Tokyo and Australia before returning the London to play an 8 week sell out season at the Queens Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. It has been published by Methuen, a UK publishing house, in a collection of plays by Complicite.^[8]

In 2006, as part of a site-specific series in an historic Minneapolis office building, Skewed Visions created the multimedia performance/installation The Hidden Room. Combining aspects of Schulz's life with his writings and drawings, the piece depicted the complex stories of his life through movement, imagery and highly stylized manipulation of objects and puppets.

In 2007, physical theatre company Double Edge Theatre premiered a piece called Republic of Dreams, based on the life and works of Bruno Schulz.

In 2008, a play based on Cinnamon Shops, directed by Frank Soehnle and performed by the Puppet Theater from Białystok, was performed at the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków.

"From A Dream to A Dream", a performance based on the writings and art of Bruno Schulz, was created collaboratively by Hand2Mouth Theatre (Portland, Oregon) and Teatr Stacja Szamocin (Szamocin, Poland) under the direction of Luba Zarembinska between 2006–2008. The production premiered in Portland in 2008.

Literary references and biography[link]

Cynthia Ozick's 1987 novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, makes reference to Schulz's work. The story is of a Swedish man who's convinced that he's the son of Schulz, and comes into possession of what he believes to be a manuscript of Schulz's final project, The Messiah. Schulz's character appears again in Israeli novelist David Grossman's 1989 novel See Under: Love. In a chapter entitled "Bruno," the narrator imagines Schulz embarking on a phantasmagoric sea voyage rather than remaining in Drohobych to be killed.^[9]

Polish writer and critic Jerzy Ficowski spent sixty years researching and uncovering the writings and drawings of Schulz. His study, Regions of the Great Heresy, was published in an English translation in 2003, containing two additional chapters to the Polish edition; one on Schulz's lost work, Messiah, the other on the rediscovery of Schulz's murals.^[10]

Israeli writer Amir Gutfreund refers to Bruno Schulz in two stories of his book, The Shoreline Mansions. The first story, "Trieste", tells the story of a man who studied drawing with Bruno Schulz, who, after the war, found Schulz's lost drawings and kept them for him. Another story in the book is "If Bruno Schulz Sat Here".

Characters in Nicole Krauss' 2005 novel The History of Love discuss The Street of Crocodiles. One of the main characters has a friend named Bruno who appears to be based on Schulz.

China Miéville's 2009 novel The City & The City begins with an epigraph from Schulz's Cinnamon Shops: "Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelgänger streets, mendacious and delusive streets". In addition to directly alluding to the dual nature of the cities in Miéville's titular novel, the epigraph also serves as a much subtler hint to the political implications of the book, since Schulz himself was murdered for appearing in the "wrong" quarter of the city.

In 2010 Jonathan Safran Foer "wrote" his "Tree of Codes" by cutting into the pages of an English language edition of Schulz' "The Street of Crocodiles" thus creating a new story.

Mural controversy[link]

In February 2001, Benjamin Geissler, a German documentary filmmaker, discovered the mural that Schulz had created for Landau. The meticulous task of restoration by Polish conservation workers had begun, who informed Yad Vashem, the Israeli holocaust memorial, of the findings. In May of that year representatives of Yad Vashem went to Drohobych to examine the mural. They removed five fragments of it and transported them to Jerusalem.^[11]

International controversy ensued.^[4][12][13] Yad Vashem said that parts of the mural were legally purchased, but the owner of the property said that no such agreement was made, and Yad Vashem did not obtain permission from the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture despite legal requirements.^[14] The fragments left in place by Yad Vashem have since been restored and, after touring Polish museums, are now part of the collection at the Bruno Schulz Museum in Drohobych.^[4]

This gesture by Yad Vashem instigated public outrage in Poland and Ukraine, where Schulz is a beloved figure.^[4]

The issue reached a settlement in 2008 when Israel recognized the works as "the property and cultural wealth" of Ukraine, and Ukraine's Drohobychyna Museum agreed to lend the works to Yad Vashem as a long-term loan.^[15] In February 2009, Yad Vashem opened to the public its display of the Schulz murals which it had removed from Drohobych.^[16]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Banks, Brian R. (2006) Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination & Legacy of Bruno Schulz. Inkermen Press, UK
• Mortkowicz-Olczakowa, Hanna (1961). Bunt wspomnień. Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.
• Adam Zagajewski. (2007) Polish Writers on Writing featuring Czeslaw Milosz. San Antonio: Trinity University Press.
• JM Coetzee, Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000–2005 New York: Penguin, 2007

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Bruno Schulz

• Works by Bruno Schulz at Project Gutenberg (in the original Polish)
• Translations by John Curran Davis
• The Art of Bruno Schulz
• Bruno Schulz's drawing and graphic works at malarze.com
• Bruno Schulz - BrunoSchulz.com
• Biography and Bibliography
• Bruno Schulz's Poetics: Quotes from his Letters and Other Writings
• A Journey into the Underworld: An essay on the film The Hour-Glass Sanatorium
• Rodopi Press anthology: scholars discuss how Schulz fits into his cultural and historical landscape, 2009
• The Street of Crocodiles an animated film by the Brothers Quay.
• Photo - Find A Grave

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the Polish Wikipedia. (June 2011) Don't speak Polish? Click here to read a machine-translated version of the Polish article. Click [show] on the right to review important translation instructions before translating. Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. After translating, {{Translated|pl|Bruno Schulz}} must be added to the talk page to ensure copyright compliance. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.