Most of what I knew about Bilbao before visiting came from the book The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky mentions how the Basque were a ocean going people, expert navigators, and shipbuilders and that before Bilbao became a city, she was first a major port for the exporting of metal and other goods during the Industrial Revolution—there you go, more evidence that Tolkien looked to the Basques for his inspiration!
What I also found interesting in the book was how the Basque had practiced capitalism way before Adam Smith penned his Wealth of Nations, in fact Kurlansky writes that Smith used the Basque as his example when he wrote his book on economics. Interesting.
May 27th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
I love your Bilbao photos and observations, Athena! I’ve always wanted to visit the Basques. I need to see if my library carries that book so I can at least visit through its pages. :-)
Did you get the sense, while you were reading the book, that some of it sounded far-fetched? Like it was Basque-centric or something? Once we had a business associate of my husband’s visit us in our home. He is Russian, and seemed charming and intelligent. I was asking him different things about Russia, and in our conversation he made what seemed to me to be rather outrageous statements. He said that the Great Wall of China was not built by Chinese, but by Russians. He said several other things that I can’t now recall that were, um, interesting. He said that he’d learned these things in college from the foremost Russian historian in the world.
I’m just wondering if you read anything like that in this book that rather begged belief.