Talk:A Descent into the Maelström

Untitled
It is not a "shipping accident" described in this story, but rather a fishing vessel that gets pulled into the maelstrom.

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Master of the genre
"one of the masters of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe"

I removed this for the sake of neutrality. 213.51.44.108 08:11, 19 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Good call. Sometimes you see the same article so many times, it all just blurs together and you don't notice these things... -Midnightdreary 13:15, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

The Reasons behind Poe’s Orthographical Choice
Last night I picked up "The Illustrated Atlas of the Nineteenth Century", a 1989 publication that is a slightly modified reprinting of an 1851 work. It mentions "[t]he celebrated whirlpool of Malstrom on the north coast [of Norway]" (page 63). This piqued up my interest, and I took a look at the etymology of the modern English word maelstrom. The word supposedly comes from the now obsolete Dutch maelstrom, which was borrowed into the Scandinavian languages in slighty different forms. I would be curious to learn why Poe decided to use the form maelström – apparently a mix-up of archaic Dutch and Swedish – while telling a story about the Norwegian coast, where the contemporary term would most likely have been malstrøm or malestrøm (not mæl‑ or mael‑). Has anybody written a paper mentioning the sources Poe used? – Jippe (talk) 16:07, 21 June 2020 (UTC)