Penisolate war

• peninsular war → penisolate war
  • A first-draft version of Finnegans wake

• Peninsular War: a major conflict during the Napoleonic Wars (1808–1814), fought in the Iberian Peninsula with Spanish rebels, Portugal, and the British allied against the French. The Duke of Wellington (HCE) fought in this conflict
  • Wikipedia

• penis in isolation → masturbation → ancient Egyptian creation myth in which the primordial god Atum masturbates the world into existence
  • Wikipedia

• pen-isolate: Joyce, a writer in exile, may have felt that his pen was isolated after the rigours of publishing Ulysses, and with the writing of the Wake his style is very much isolated from that of mainstream literature
  • At the end of his life Giambattista Vico wrote in a letter that he expected nothing from his ungrateful native city of Naples but the complete isolation that allowed him to concentrate on his writing.

• Howth: a peninsula close to Dublin city
  • on 10 August 1177, the Norman warlord Sir Armory (or Almeric) Tristram supposedly conquered Howth from its Hiberno-Norse occupants in a battle fought near the Bridge of Evora, which crosses a stream that was renamed the "Bloody Stream" after the battle. (Evora is also the name of a Portugeuse seaport whose populaton was massacred by the French when the rebelled against French rule during the Peninsular War)
  • A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer

• Peloponnesian War: : war fought between Sparta and Athens and their allies in the fifth century BCE. The Peloponnese was a peninsula separated from mainland Greece by the Isthmus of Corinth
  • Wikipedia

• penicillate: resembling or pertaining to a pencil or paint-brush

• isola: (Italian) isle; island

• isolate: Isolde, or Issy
  • Penisolate: HCE's sexual interest in his daughter Issy

• penisolate: penis of late

• penisolate war → suggests Giambattista Vico's notions of barbarian times expressed in The New Science. (Quotes are from The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1948):
  • p.358: "1051 Moreover, from the fifth century onward, when so many barbarous nations began to inundate Europe and Asia and Africa as well, and the conquering peoples could not make themselves understood by the conquered, it came about from the barbarism of the enemies of the Catholic religion that in those iron times we can find no contemporary documents in the vulgar tongues, whether Italian, French, Spanish, or even German. (As for the Germans, they did not begin to write documents in their language until the times of Frederick of Swabia, according to Johann Aventinus in his Annals of Bavaria [Annales Boiorum], or even until those of the Emperor Rudolph of Hapsburg according to others, as we have already mentioned.) Among all the aforesaid nations we find documents only in barbarous Latin, understood only by a very few nobles who were also ecclesiastics. Hence we may assume that in all those unhappy centuries the nations had reverted to communicating with each other in a mute language. Because of this paucity of vulgar letters, there must everywhere have been a return to the hieroglyphic writing of family coats-of-arms, which, in order to give certainty to ownership (as above explained), signified seigniorial rights usually over houses, tombs, fields and flocks."[1]
  • p. 359: "1053 There was a return of heroic raids. We saw above that, as the heroes had counted it an honor to be called robbers, so now it was a title of nobility to be a corsair."[2]

• penny-solid
• penis-solid