What's a Wakepedia?

75 years of Finnegans Wake scholarship have successfully identified most of the meanings of most of the words in FW-- scholarship now mostly searchable at fweet.org.

Since Joyce's stated intent was "a history of the world" we should expect an encyclopedia's worth of allusions to most all the major events of that history, but reflecting Joyce's idiosyncratic analysis of which events were most important to him.

Most especially, Irish history gets a singular emphasis, with all other events measured against their Irish echoes.

Using Fweet, it's now practical to pick any topic, search for all allusions, and compose a brief overview of that topic through Joyce's Wakean eyes, illustrated with his quotes (currently following Fweet in using the standard pagination, with most pagenumbers linked to the Fweet page).

So this Annotated-FW edition will progress in two parallel streams: line-by-line but also major-topic by major-topic.

('Wakepedia' has 4 syllables like Wikipedia (or should it be Wækepædia?))

We can expect all the major topics to be introduced in the early pages, with increasingly-minor sub-topics being addressed later.

(It remains to be seen how these topic pages should be indexed. For now, use Blogger's 'archive' menu in the righthand margin-- those dates are all fictitious.)

Articles will progress thru various stages of completion, from empty placeholders, to simple fweet-links, to unsorted fweet-text dumps, to sorted and cleaned up fweet-dumps... (A lot of this can be done pretty mindlessly during otherwise wasted time.)

So far:

FW title song

Finn MacCool

Eve and Adam

poop

Howth

Tristan and Iseult

the St Lawrence family

Jesus

invasions

cardinal points (nsew)

Wellington

the 'Dublin' name

St Patrick

Jacob, Esau and Isaac

Parnell

Swift

Shakespeare

Scotland

Noah

alcohol

rainbows

Vico

thunder

Humpty Dumpty

orange

Phoenix Park

Ulysses

Ibsen

Guinness family

phallic and yonic symbols

Islam

Brian O'Linn

pee

Wales

astrology

WG Wills, Royal Divorce

cardinal numbers

LeFanu

Buddhism

Bruno

Hungarian


The parallel annotations will try to account for every letter of the drafts and published text.