20 February 2008

Sherlock footnotes

Many Britons think that Gandhi and Churchill were fictional and that Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur were not. Ignoring the gee-they're-as-dumb-as-us aspect, I was reminded of the Sherlock scholars' concept of "the game". I had encountered the game before I knew what it was, and was pleasantly baffled. When I got the new Leslie S. Klinger editions, I was entertained by the footnotes that puzzled over dramatic gaffes in the text (e.g. "How could Holmes have missed that clue? Surely Watson was remembering wrong when he wrote of these events..."). "Why are they being silly" was quickly replaced by "hey, this is kinda neat!"

I wonder if this exists in other scholarship.

[ posted by sstrader on 20 February 2008 at 4:49:41 PM in Language & Literature ]