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Richard Hinckley Allen:
Star Names — Their Lore and Meaning

Assessment

Allen rendered a very valuable service to those of us interested in the nomenclature and historical evolution of the constellations and their stars. His book is a mine (or maybe a minefield!) of varied information not only on its primary subject, but also here and there on ancient myth and religion, folklore, astrology both modern and ancient, the heroic age of modern astronomy, and the occasional bit of botany or zoology.

Inevitably, though, in a work of such scope, and one that is now already over a hundred years old, there will be room for fault. The three principal shortcomings of the book are that it is not as systematic as the subject deserves, sometimes a downright jumble of ancient languages and afterthoughts and digressions and backtracking; that the astronomy predates Palomar and the Hubble telescope, radar and quasars, by decades and decades and is best taken lightly, as a window into the late 19c rather than into the stuff of the Universe; and, most seriously, that the sources are condensed, for the most part uncited, and — worst of all — trusted.

Now Allen's Latin and Greek are usually unexceptionable: I will vouch for that — wishing only that he had chosen to cite Firmicus Maternus and Vettius Valens as well as Manilius, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos as well as the Almagest. But my own languages run out at about the same point as his: yet it's obvious even to the casual reader that for Arabic and, a fortiori, such languages as Chinese and Khorasmian, he relies heavily on secondary and tertiary sources; during the course of my transcription, I rather quickly started wondering just how accurate he is in this regard. My suspicions were confirmed: see for example "A Note on Star Names — Especially Arabic — and Their Literature"; but more particularly, you owe it to yourself to read Gary Thompson's excellent critique, in which we are provided with more up-to‑date and reliable alternatives to Allen's book; his entire site is full of solid and interesting information on the evolution of astronomy and some of its by-ways: you'll be forgiven if you now skip mine altogether.

If, however, you do stick around, at least two further caveats: references to Pliny are suspect, i.e., statements are often ascribed to him which are not his; and you should disregard the fabulously early dates assigned by Allen to Greek temples. The temple of Hera at Olympia, for example, which he assigns to 1445 B.C. (p468), dates to only about 600 B.C.

Table of Contents

The page numbers of the print edition, given in the right-hand column, link to the corresponding webpages.

Technical Details

Edition Used

The 1963 Dover Books reprint, "an unabridged and corrected republication of the first edition of the work first published in by G. E. Stechert in 1899, under the former title: Star-Names and Their Meanings." (The "corrected" gave me pause, until I was assured by Prof. Thompson's review that only minor grammatical corrections are meant.)

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined; and in this particular case, with its minute diacritical-rich transliterations of Arabic and other languages, scanning would have produced a horrible hash requiring more time to set right than just typing it correctly from the git-go.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. I run a first proofreading pass immediately after entering each section; then a second proofreading, detailed and meant to be final: in the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe them to be completely errorfree; red backgrounds would mean that the section had not received that second final proofreading. The header bar at the top of each webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition seems to have been very well proofread, or at least, taking into consideration the many rather exotic languages called upon, there are very few errors I could recognize or fix. When I could fix them, I did, marking the correction each time with one of these: º. If for some reason I could not fix the error or merely suspected one, it is marked º: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet to read what was actually printed. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles. Very occasionally, also, I use this blue circle to make some brief comment.

Inconsistencies or errors in punctuation are remarkably few; they have been corrected to the author's usual style, in a slightly different color — barely noticeable on the page when it's a comma for example like this one, but it shows up in the sourcecode as <SPAN CLASS="emend">. Finally, a number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, apparently duplicated citations, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have the printed edition in front of you.

Pagination and Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is indicated in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ): it's hardly fair to give you "pp53‑56" as a reference and not tell you where p56 ends. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. (If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.) Finally, on a very occasional basis so far, I've tracked down some of the citations and inserted them, as links, directly into Allen's text but always clearly differentiated from it by [this format]; I may do more.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a color-edited detail of the constellation Aries from the plate entitled Haemisphaerium stellatum boreale antiquum in the Harmonia Macrocosmica, a star atlas first published in Amsterdam in 1660 by Andreas Cellarius; the edition was a success — the plates are splendid — and it was immediately reprinted the following year.

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