Questions of history are not settled by juries or the votes of committees. They are not disposed of by resolutions of historical institutions. Sometimes they are not solved at all and continue to puzzle generation after generation. It may happen that new evidence or new discoveries on some disputed problems can add sources of knowledge not previously used. And it is possible that fresh analyses of old sources, made by newer scholarship with the aid of new evidence or altered perspectives, or both, may help to clarify questions that have defeated scholars in the past.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, July 17, 2022
Truth by Committee Vote
Theodore C. Blegen, The Kensington Rune Stone: New Light on an Old Riddle (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1968), p. 90: