![\"German](\"https:\/\/www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de\/cover\/hohlweg\/1.jpg\")
Roads are an easy victim for poets of all sorts. Road-songs are legion and the image of the road to be travelled is omnipresent in literature. While we deal with the historic dimension of the European road networks from a scientific point of view, future projects should include this artistic perception of roads and their quality as a special space. The transitory nature on the one hand contrasts with the longue dur\u00e9e of road infrastructure on the other hand. As Macfarlane puts it:<\/p>\n
\u201cI now understand it certainly to be the case, though I have long imagined it to be true, that stretches of a path might carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Holloway, first published in Oxford by Quive Smith Editions in 2012, have a look at this blog post of Caught by the River: here<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n
There are great projects in contemporary photography (From A to B – Exhibition at Museum Morsbroich<\/a> or Andy Lee’s Roads less travelled<\/a>), but roads are present in historic paintings and prints, as well. Taking Japan\u2019s art history, it is notably Katsushika Hokusai\u2019s (\u845b\u98fe \u5317\u658e, 1760-1849) woodblock print series Fifty-three Stations on the T\u014dkaid\u014d Road<\/a> from 1801\/1806, that took its inspiration from one of the main imperial highways of the Edo period. The T\u014dkaid\u014d was one of the so called Five Routes (\u4e94\u8857\u9053, Gokaid\u014d) that were laid out under the Tokugawa shogunate from 1603 onwards. These highways were to connect the provinces to the capital Edo (now called Tokyo) running from there in all directions. The most frequented of these roads certainly was the connection between Edo and Kyoto, the T\u014dkaid\u014d.
\nTravelling through the Rain in Tsuchiyama in 1802, from Hokusai, Fifty-three Stations of the T\u00f4kaid\u00f4 Road<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nJapanese poetry knew these roads as well. In 1689 the already famous poet Bash\u014d (\u677e\u5c3e \u82ad\u8549, 1644-1694) set out on a journey through central Japan, from Edo to Tohoku in the north and along the western coast back south to lake Biwa. The journey took him around half a year to complete. His aim was to imitate the old travelling poets of the 8th to 12th centuries, and to write down his impressions in Haiku poems. The \u201cNarrow Road to Oku<\/a>\u201d (Oku no Hosomichi \u5965\u306e\u7d30\u9053), is a mixture of prose and poetry, thus making it a light read and an absolute Japanese classic.
\nEven though Matsuo Bash\u014d claims in the title to have taken narrow roads, he used for long parts of his journey the main highways of his time. From Edo to Fukushima he wandered along the \u014csh\u016b Kaid\u014d (\u5965\u5dde\u8857\u9053). The routes existed for centuries before, and Bash\u014d knew that. One of his destinations was the Shirakawa Barrier (Shirakawa no Seki \u767d\u6cb3\u306e\u95a2), a border post that had controlled the traffic between the Nara Empire and the northern tribes as early as in the 8th century. In Bash\u014d\u2019s lifetime it had long been gone, but the place became a poetic symbol for setting out onto a long journey and for a transition into an undiscovered world, be it geographical or referring to the inner space. <\/p>\n\u201cAfter many days of solitary wandering, I came at last to the barrier-gate of Shirakawa, which marks the entrance to the northern regions. Here, for the first time, my mind was able to gain a certain balance and composure, no longer victim to pestering anxiety, so it was with a mild sense of detachment that I thought about the ancient traveller who had passed through this gate with a burning desire to write home.\u201d (Translation by Sam Hamill in a nicely done edition by Shambala Centaur Editions, Boston & London 1991).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
While travelling he took with him some disciples along certain parts of the route and met others at places he passed. while he wanted to be at certain times at special places (for example did he reach Tsuruga Harbour right in time for the Harvest Moon, but the clouds spoiled the experience for him).<\/p>\n
The experience of nature is something that is a central theme in \u201cHolloway\u201d, as well. \u201cOn their sides, between the tree roots that snake grotesque & wild, grow the umbrals: hart\u2019s tongue fern, shining cranesbill, ivy & moschatel, the lover of shade\u201d. Light and shadow, the damp soil, animals and plants, the view of mountain ridges are so accurately described that you get the feeling of joining the small group on their bicycle tour on ancient paths that is being described in the text. Not by coincidence the parish of Selborne is mentioned (Gilbert White wrote a now famous treatise on \u201cthe Natural History of Selborne\u201d in 1789, that has its place in the canon of environmental historians as well as literates of all sorts). At the same the narrator remembers a past trip with a now gone friend, giving the whole enterprise a further dimension. The road can be travelled into the past, as well. <\/p>\n
As an object of textual and visual arts, and not only as a necessary part in describing a hero\u2019s journey, the Road can widen the perspective on our research topic. As the examples show, it can span continents and centuries, too. Coming back to the digital mapping of historic routes – once the methodology is established, why not do it for Japan, as well?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Niels Petersen, Team G\u00f6ttingen When bookstores reopened in Germany after the first anti-pandemic measures, it was the cover of a German translation of Robert Macfarlane\u2019s \u201cHolloway\u201d (\u201cHohlweg\u201d in German) that caught my eye in the display (it might have to do something with a biased view\u2026). The Artist Stanley Donwood created an image of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":711,"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions\/711"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de\/roads\/viabundus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}