Waddell Augustine (4 results)

paperback. Condition: Very Good.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Reprint. Hardback. Dust Jacket. 4to. pp xv, 152. Original publisher's red cloth. Introduction by Jamna Das Akhtar. First published in 1894. Neat publisher's stamp on verso title page, otherwise very good in slightly used, near very good dust jacket.

Green Cloth. Condition: Good. First Edition. xviii, 598 pages, 2 pages of advertising, plates and text illustrations. 2cm tear across the middle of the spine, spine a little darkened with light wear at top and bottom, old inscription dated 1896. Includes an old photograph of a Buddha statue.

First edition, first impression, in the first issue jacket. In this nationalist rewriting of the Norse Poetic Edda, Waddell asserts that the Poetic Edda is of British origin, citing the original Icelandic as deriving from a Scottish linguistic root. Lawrence Waddell (1854-1938, his first name sometimes spelt "Laurence") joined the Indian Medical Service in 1880, serving as an assistant sanitary commissioner and later as the medical officer for the district of Darjeeling. He wrote regularly for several journals on the history of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism and in 1894 published "a highly substantial and valuable treatise, entitled The Buddhism of Tibet, or, Lamaism" (ODNB). He was recruited for the Younghusband mission into Tibet in 1903 to 1904, during which he is alleged to have looted a large quantity of Tibetan Buddhist texts and relics, using these in his later prolific archaeological writings. In 1905, he became professor of Tibetan at University College London. He retired to the Isle of Bute, where, between 1924 and 1930, he produced "a series of large, well-illustrated volumes of archaeology, ancient history, and paleolinguistics built upon, in the words of his obituarist, 'conjectures ignoring all principles and results of sober research'" (Moshenska, p. 50). Waddell's "hopes of rewriting the story of civilization with the Aryan race as the first and only protagonist rapidly faded as his works and ideas remained restricted to, if well rooted in, the ultra right wing fringes of society and scholarship" (Moshenska, p. 51). Gabriel Moshenska, "'At Variance With Both General and Expert Opinion': The Later Works of Lieutenant-Colonel Professor Laurence Austine Waddell", Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, vol. 20, no. 1, May 2010. Octavo. Frontispiece and 29 plates, illustrations in text; title page printed in red and black. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, spine and front cover decorated in gilt. With dust jacket. Bumps to faintly yellowed spine ends; jacket spine toned, shallow chips to ends, nicks to edges, unclipped: a near-fine copy in very good jacket.