Monthly Archives: July 2026

Radom Thoughts in Search of a Narrative

27 July 2026 By in History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Wood is evolution’s most durable invention. The material that made height, permanence, and stability possible. When trees rose, the world changed: ecosystems and climates steadied, and the conditions for complex life expanded. Long before humans appeared, wood was already shaping the stage we would inherit. Without trees, life would be harsher; without wood, civilization would never have found its footing.

Trees emerged more than 385 million years ago and have since diversified into over 73,000 known species and, by some estimates, roughly three trillion individuals. They anchor ecosystems, feed and shelter life, and help regulate the planet’s climate. Yet they resist definition. “Tree” is not a single lineage but a recurring evolutionary strategy; the decision to rise above other plants by building height, structure, and longevity.

At its broadest definition, a tree is simply a perennial plant with a trunk and branching leaves. This inclusive definition sweeps in tree ferns, palms, bananas, and other tall monocots. Stricter definitions insist on woody tissue and secondary growth, limiting “trees” to the gymnosperms and angiosperms: conifers and hardwoods. Still other definitions narrow the term to plants capable of producing lumber or exceeding a certain height. The ambiguity is not really a flaw but more a clue to their diversity: trees are not defined by their ancestry but by their form.

The adaptation that gave trees their decisive advantage was the evolution of secondary xylem, or true wood. A ring of vascular tissue: the cambium, laid down successive layers of lignified support, allowing trunks to resist gravity and wind. With wood, plants could grow taller, capture more sunlight, and outcompete the low canopy. Height became an advantage and a renewable resource.

The earliest trees we know of belong to the tree ferns and the enigmatic cladoxylopsids of the Devonian, around 385 million years ago. Gymnosperms followed roughly around 319 million years ago, dominating vast forests through the Carboniferous and Permian. Flowering trees or the angiosperms: appeared in the Cretaceous and began overtaking conifers during the Tertiary, reshaping forests into the forms we recognize today.

When the first true trees appeared, they did so on a planet whose landmasses were slowly converging into a single supercontinent. By the Late Carboniferous and Permian, nearly all terrestrial surfaces were fused into Pangaea, a world with vast continental interiors far from the moderating influence of the sea. This geography shaped the evolution and distribution of early forests. The interior of Pangaea was marked by extreme seasonality; scorching summers, frigid winters, and long dry intervals, conditions that favored drought‑tolerant, cold‑resistant, and fire‑adapted trees. Conifers, cycads, ginkgos, and seed ferns thrived in these demanding environments, their anatomies tuned to stress: thick bark, needle‑like leaves, deep roots, and wood optimized for survival rather than speed.

Moisture was scarce far from the coasts, and tropical humidity was confined to narrow belts along the supercontinent’s margins. As a result, Pangaea’s forests were not lush, sprawling jungles but mosaics of hardy gymnosperms, polar forests capable of enduring months of darkness, and southern Gondwanan expanses dominated by Glossopteris and other cool‑climate flora. The supercontinent constrained tree evolution; it rewarded survival over diversity.

The breakup of Pangaea at the dawn of the Mesozoic transformed this picture. As rifting began in the Triassic and accelerated through the Jurassic, new coastlines formed, shallow seas flooded continental margins, and maritime climates replaced interior aridity. Continents drifted into new latitudes, expanding tropical belts and creating humid monsoon zones. The fragmentation of land produced ecological variety: islands, peninsulas, archipelagos, and isolated basins; each a laboratory for evolutionary experimentation.

These changes opened ecological space that flowering plants would later exploit. Angiosperms appear in the Early Cretaceous, but their explosive rise depends on the world created by Pangaea’s dissolution: warm, wet climates; diverse habitats; and the proliferation of pollinators and seed dispersers. As Gondwana itself broke apart, its daughter continents carried distinct floras with them. South America developed Araucaria and Nothofagus forests; Australia evolved eucalypts and casuarinas; Africa retained ancient podocarps; India drifted northward into the tropics and became a crucible for angiosperm radiation. Even Antarctica, then forested, hosted conifers and southern beeches before drifting into its deep freeze.

In short, Pangaea’s existence limited the diversity of trees by imposing climatic extremes and ecological uniformity. Its breakup liberated them. The Mesozoic world became a patchwork of climates and landscapes, and trees responded with an evolutionary flowering that reshaped the planet’s forests into the forms we recognize today.

Moving into the Tertiary repeated glacial–interglacial cycles, intensifying from late Miocene cooling through the Pliocene and into the full Quaternary ice‑age regime, drove major contractions, expansions, and reorganizations of Earth’s forests. Cooling, drying, lower atmospheric CO₂, advancing ice sheets, falling sea levels, and shifting precipitation patterns forced forests to migrate, fragment, and reassemble again and again.

Long-term Cenozoic cooling accelerated in the late Miocene (~7–5 Ma), just as early hominins were beginning to appear. Subtropical and mid‑latitude regions dried as the hydrological cycle weakened. Closed-canopy forests contracted; grasslands and savannas expanded across Africa, Asia, North America, and South America. Fire regimes intensified under more seasonal climates, helping convert woodlands into open grassy biomes. Rainforests retreated from many subtropical regions, setting the stage for the more extreme oscillations to come.

Once Northern Hemisphere ice sheets became prominent (~2.6 Ma onward), 40–100 kyr cycles produced repeated, large-amplitude swings. Ice sheets covered vast areas of North America, Europe, and Asia, pushing forests southward or into isolated pockets. Continuous temperate and mixed forests vanished from high and mid‑latitudes. Boreal forests shifted far south; spruce‑ and pine‑dominated vegetation reached into what is now the southeastern United States. Across Europe and Siberia, treeless steppe, tundra, and parkland expanded.

Tropical forests fragmented under cooler, drier conditions, lower CO₂, and increased fire, breaking into mosaics of forest, woodland, and grassland.

During interglacials, including the present Holocene, ice retreated, temperatures rose, and forests surged northward and upslope. Boreal forests reclaimed high latitudes; temperate deciduous forests recolonized mid‑latitudes; tropical forests coalesced again. Migration rates were rapid, often several to more than ten kilometers per century, limited only by seed dispersal, soil development, and competition. Some regions experienced temporary prairie or oak‑savanna expansions during warmer, drier intervals.

Forests survived glacial extremes in southern peninsulas, unglaciated corridors, lower‑latitude pockets, and moisture‑retaining microhabitats. Repeated isolation caused population bottlenecks, genetic differentiation, and later mixing during recolonization. Some warm‑temperate taxa disappeared entirely from Europe and North America, unable to migrate past barriers such as the Mediterranean. Tropical forests experienced range contractions and population declines. Modern boreal, temperate, and tropical forest distributions still reflect post‑glacial recolonization from these refugia.

In short, the Miocene–Pleistocene cycles transformed the extensive forests of the mid‑Miocene into oscillating biomes: forests compressed southward during glacials, fragmented into refugia, and expanded again during interglacials. These rhythms left permanent marks on species ranges, diversity, and genetic structure.

At the dawn of agriculture, forests covered nearly six billion hectares (14.8 billion acres); more than half of Earth’s habitable land. It was into this heavily forested world that humanity began its long, transformative relationship with wood: a relationship that would shape every early society. Wood is the first material we mastered, the first technology we shaped, and the foundation on which every early human society stood. Humanity entered a world dominated by trees, and from the first fields onward, civilization grew by cutting, shaping, burning, and building with wood.

To understand how agriculture transformed our relationship with wood, we must first look at the simpler relationship that came before it.

Long before humans shaped wood, we burned it. Fire is humanity’s oldest tool, and wood its earliest fuel. Hominins were using fire at least a million years ago, but this relationship was simple: gather fallen branches, feed the flames, survive the night. Fire changed our bodies, our diets, and our social lives; but it did not yet bind us to trees in any transformative way. Wood was energy, not yet material.

Around ten thousand years ago, as the last ice sheets retreated and the Holocene stabilized, humans began to cultivate plants and settle permanently. We entered a world dominated by trees, and the first civilizing acts of agriculture was to cut them down.

The earliest farmers cleared forests not with axes but with fire. They burned woodland to open fields, enrich soil with ash, and drive away animals. What had once been a scattered, opportunistic use of wood became systematic. Forests that had expanded northward during the interglacial now faced a new force of contraction: human need for open land and wood.

With agriculture came human roots. Settlements required structures; structures required timber. Tools needed handles; fields needed fences; granaries needed beams. Wood became the backbone of early technology: the material for digging sticks, hoes, plows, and irrigation troughs. Fire remained essential, but now it served new purposes; firing pottery, hardening wooden points, and later smelting metal. Wood was no longer simply fuel; it was infrastructure of civilization.

Agriculture also created scarcity. As villages grew into towns, and towns into early cities, the demand for wood intensified. Forests that had survived ice ages, droughts, and tectonic shifts now faced continuous clearing. Coppicing, managed woodland, and selective cutting emerged as early forms of forestry. Humanity began to understand that wood was both renewable and exhaustible; a resource that required care even as it was consumed.

This is the true beginning of the Age of Wood: not in the canopy with proto‑hominins, but in the fields of the first farmers. Fire made us human; agriculture made us dependent on wood. From this point forward, the story of civilization is inseparable from the story of forests. How we cut them, shaped them, burned them, used them to build, and eventually learned how to manage them.

The Age of Wood is an energetic and imaginative book. Ennos writes with a biologist’s curiosity, a craftsman’s affection for materials, and a genuine sense of wonder at the role wood has played in human civilization. His pages are full of lively observations; how wood burns, how it bends, how it shapes tools, shelters, ships, and societies. There is real enthusiasm in his writing, and real pleasure in following his mind as it leaps from one wooden artifact to another.

Yet enthusiasm is not structure, and curiosity is not chronology. Ennos’s book flutters from topic to topic without ever quite putting down roots. It gestures toward the deep history of wood, but it never begins at the beginning: with trees themselves. What a tree is, when trees arose, and how they came to dominate the terrestrial world are questions that remain largely unasked in his narrative. The result is a book full of interesting moments but lacking the foundational story that would give those moments coherence.

This essay attempts to supply that missing foundation. Before one can tell the story of wood and civilization, one must understand the story of trees: their evolutionary invention of wood, their rise on a changing planet, their spread across continents, their contraction and expansion under ice and climate, and the world they created by the time humans first began to cut them down. Only with that deeper history in view does humanity’s relationship with wood become clear; not a series of disconnected anecdotes, but a long, symbiotic entanglement between a species and a material that shaped its destiny.

Ennos chose to present wood as a sequence of bullet points, each interesting but only loosely connected. The deeper story is richer: wood as an evolutionary breakthrough, forests as planetary architects, and humanity as the inheritor of a world built by trees. The Age of Wood could have been a more enlightening treatment of this relationship, but its foundation was never laid. Hopefully this essay provides that foundation.

Graphic: Stave Church, Minot, ND, USA.  Source: The Age of Wood by Roland Ennos. 2020.

Time and Roland

25 July 2026 By in Poetry Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Song of Roland, the actual point of this story, is a romantic Crusade‑era epic of courage and fortitude, but its origins lie along a long and winding road; a path the world has seen many times before, shaped not by heroism but by political confusion, shifting loyalties, and the hard realities of Muslim civil war in eighth‑century al‑Shām (greater Syria) and Spain.

In 661 AD, year 40 by the Islamic calendar, the Islamic world was ruled by the Umayyad dynasty from Damascus. After nearly a century in power, resentment from non‑Arab converts and continual internal corruption fueled an Abbasid revolutionary movement centered in Persia. In 750, the Abbasids defeated the Umayyad army at the Battle of the Zab in northern Iraq, marched into Damascus, and carried out one of the most violent and consequential political massacres in Islamic history: a systematic extermination of the Umayyad ruling family.

One young Umayyad prince, Abd al‑Rahman, escaped the purge. After a long flight across North Africa, he reached Spain and founded the Emirate of Córdoba. Through the 760s and 770s he consolidated his rule over Córdoba, Seville, Málaga, Granada, Jaén, Mérida, and Toledo. His authority in the south was real, but the northern Iberian Peninsula remained unstable.

The Peninsula was locked in a protracted and confusing Muslim civil war between Abd al‑Rahman and a cluster of rebellious but powerful northern governors in the Ebro Valley, centered around Zaragoza, Barcelona, and Girona. These governors had long traditions of autonomy and viewed Abd al‑Rahman’s centralizing reforms as a direct threat to their power. Frontier loyalties simmered and shifted constantly.

By 776–777, the northern elites realized they were losing ground. Abd al‑Rahman had crushed several uprisings and installed loyalists in key cities. The rebels needed a counterweight; a distant power strong enough to deter Córdoba but too far away to dominate them. They found their candidate in Charlemagne, king of the Franks.

Thus, at the winter assembly of 776–777 in Paderborn, in what is now northern Germany, Muslim envoys from Barcelona, Girona, and Zaragoza appeared before Charlemagne and offered submission, tribute, and the keys to their cities if he would intervene on their behalf. To Charlemagne, this looked like a rare strategic opportunity: a chance to extend Frankish influence into Spain without a full conquest, to secure the Pyrenean frontier, and to present himself as a protector of Christians; even though the rebels were Muslim. He believed the campaign would be quick: Zaragoza would open its gates, the northern cities would align with him, and a friendly buffer zone would emerge.

But the political map of 777 did not survive into 778.

When Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees in the summer of 778 with roughly 20,000–30,000 fighting men, divided into two great columns, one of the largest assembled armies of his reign, he discovered that the civil war had neither remained as presented to him in the previous year nor had it resolved itself, but only shifted in its loyalties. The same factions existed, but their alliances had flipped. Most critically, al‑Husayn of Zaragoza, who had invited Charlemagne the year before, had reconciled with Abd al‑Rahman. Handing Zaragoza to the Franks now meant treason, loss of office, and retaliation from Córdoba. So, when Charlemagne arrived, Zaragoza refused to open its gates.

Other northern rebels remained hostile to Córdoba and even accompanied the Frankish army. But the coalition was fractured, Abd al‑Rahman’s position had strengthened, and Charlemagne’s intelligence was outdated. He had come expecting a diplomatic handover, not a siege, and he had brought no siege equipment nor an expectation of large casualties.

Frustrated, Charlemagne withdrew northward. On his way out, he destroyed the walls of Pamplona, a Christian Basque city whose loyalties were equally tangled in frontier politics. Why Charlemagne did this is subject to much conjecture. It may have been that the Basques of Pamplona resisted Frankish authority and failed to support his Spanish campaign and he set to destroy the city as punishment. Or maybe it was he just needed a trophy for coming to Spain. Whatever the reason, this act of punitive demolition provoked a swift and devastating response. On 15 August 778, as the Frankish column wound through the high passes of the western Pyrenees, Basque fighters ambushed the rearguard at Roncevaux, thought to have been comprised of 2000-3000 men. The attack was local, precise, and motivated by revenge; not by treachery, not by Saracens, not for any strategic advantage, and certainly not by any grand religious reasoning. The Basque rout at Roncevaux was a small skirmish in scale but deadly in execution: a perfect mountain ambush that totally annihilated Charlemagne’s rear guard and left Hruodlandus, aka Roland, prefect of the Breton March, dead on the field.

For two centuries, these events remained a footnote in Carolingian history. Only later would poets transform this small frontier skirmish into the epic clash of civilizations remembered in literature as The Song of Roland.

Between roughly 1040 and 1115, poets reshaped this obscure Charlemagne defeat into a 4000-line epic: La Chanson de Roland, the first great chanson de geste or song of heroic deeds; the oldest surviving major work of French literature. It exists in various manuscript versions, which testify to its enormous and enduring popularity in Medieval and Renaissance literature from the 12th to the 16th centuries.

The world of this poem is not Charlemagne’s but that of the First Crusade. Europe, at the time, was steeped in martial piety, exhausted from centuries of loses to Islamic battles, and hungry for heroic narratives that stiffened spines and sanctified warfare.

The Basques became Saracens; the ambush became an existential battle; and the competent but anonymous frontier officer became the greatest knight of Christendom. The poet introduced Ganelon, Roland’s treacherous stepfather: a purely literary invention inspired by Wenilo, Archbishop of Sens, whose betrayal of Charles the Bald in 858 has been remembered as a notorious but forgivable act of treachery. Ganelon’s presence in this epic gave the story a moral architecture: loyalty was sacred, betrayal was damnable, and death in battle as martyrdom.

Written in the age of the First Crusade, The Song of Roland functioned as a cultural acceptation; a proto‑psychological operation in the medieval sense of influencing the narrative. It was performed aloud by jongleurs before nobles and soldiers, shaping morale, morals, and belief; providing strength before the upcoming battle.

To grasp how Roland as a knight lived, one must imagine the Crusader host as a moving medieval city, which it certainly was. Alongside knights marched wives, children, servants, cooks, smiths, merchants, priests, prostitutes, beggars, and entertainers. Jongleurs and minstrels were professionals, paid in coin, food, and or protection. They sang heroic epics, shared and spread the news, entertained the masses, and sustained morale.

A typical day for the Crusading mass began before dawn: fires were rekindled, tents struck, wagons slowly began to creak forward. Foraging parties scoured the countryside, and when supplies ran low, commanders sanctioned plunder. Merchants sold bread and wine at inflated prices. At dusk, musicians performed, chanting epics like The Song of Roland to remind weary soldiers that their suffering had divine meaning and eventual rewards.

In traveling and siege camps, disease and hunger were constant, yet the performers remained vital. They turned defeats and stalemates into martyrdoms, victories into proof of divine favor, and rumors into rallying cry for continued vigilance. In a world without newspapers or mass communication, the performer was the medium: the voice of not only fact but ideology.

As the Crusading armies marched towards the Holy Land, they were sustained by stripping the land and villages of necessities to sustain their travels. Sometimes by honest barter or payment in coin but mostly by looting. Their vast retinues; sometimes in the tens of thousands of noncombatants, depended on this economy for survival. Looting was not a supplement to their survival but a basic need and the main monetary incentive for the knights. The accumulated loot of money, livestock, grain, clothing, and slaves circulated throughout the camp. And entertainers survived and sometimes thrived in this system, rewarded by nobles and soldiers alike for songs that glorified conquest and sanctified endurance.

Thus, The Song of Roland was not merely art and entertainment. It was part of the apparatus and psychology of war. The need for myth to instill the courage to endure the hardships of the campaign.

Formally, Roland is written in Old French decasyllables: ten syllables per line with a strong caesura or pause after the fourth syllable. The poem is organized into laisses, irregular stanzas bound by assonance, repeated vowel sounds, rather than rhyme. This meter was engineered for oral delivery: rhythmic or chant like, memorable, and flexible enough for performance amid the noise of camp life.

The Song of Roland uses numerous repeated laisses that function like refrains, emotional anchors that heighten tension and aid memory. These repetitions are not a literary embellishment but rather a performance skill, akin to the chorus of a modern song. They allowed jongleurs to emphasize key moments and helped audiences participate emotionally in the unfolding drama. Although no direct evidence survives for vocal audience participation, the refrain‑like structure almost certainly encouraged audible, communal responses at predictable points in the performance.

The historical Roland died in a forgotten mountain pass. The literary Roland lives as the embodiment of loyalty, faith, and heroic death. The poem that bears his name is not history but a psychological tale of courage. A Crusade‑era vision of how men should fight, die, and what they should believe.

In the end, The Song of Roland is less about Charlemagne’s Spain than about Europe’s soul: how myth can redeem failure, how art can sanctify violence, and how a single ambush became the anthem of a civilization.

Centuries later, the medieval Roland echoed through folklore and literature. From the 13th through the 16th century, English Arthurian oral tradition recast him as Childe Rowland, a young knight who ventures into a perilous, enchanted realm to rescue his sister from a dark tower. In the early 17th century, Shakespeare drops a fragment of that myth into King Lear: “Childe Rowland to the dark tower came”, a line that signals the play’s descent into an epitome of madness and nightmare.

In 1855, Robert Browning seized on Shakespeare’s phrase and expanded it into a full quest of existential dread in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, transforming the folkloric knight into a solitary wanderer in a blasted psychological landscape. From there the Roland arc marches forward. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series takes its inspiration from Browning’s poem, recasting Roland as a gunslinger on a doomed, metaphysical quest.

The medieval epic thus became the deep ancestor of modern mythmaking. A story born from a minor, forgotten skirmish, transformed into ideology and legend, and perpetuated through art. It is one of the most remarkable literary genealogies in Western literature: a single line of verse, “Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,” mutating and reappearing across a millennium. And to give modern pop culture its own whimsical participation trophy, we might end with Warren Zevon’s contribution: “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.”

Graphic: Painting by Wolf von Bibra (1862 – 1922) of Battle of Roncevaux Pass from The Song of Roland based on print either by Adolf Georg Closs (1840-1894) or Gustav Adolf Carl Closs (1864-1938). Painting is based on an etching by Louis Felix Guesnet (1843-1907). Photograph of painting taken by Carl von Bibra. Wikipedia Creative Commons.