PAUL NIAVIS, THE ORIGIN OF "AVATAR", and Carl Orff's CARMINA BURANA

Outside of the borderland areas of Plauen, i.e. Germany and Bohemia (Czech Republic), almost no one knows the name Paulus Niavis, originally born Paul Schneevogel (Snowbird in German) in the town of Eger in 1460 just as the Age of Latin would begin to die as universal language for most of Western European scholars and elite. It was also when the Age of Discovery and Imperialism for Europeans was just getting ready to begin.

Paul Schneevogel grew up in the town of Plauen and went off to college in Ingolstadt. Next, he then received his masters degree in Leipzig. Schneevogel would then serve first as a school master Chemnitz and later as a rector in Halle. Finally, he went to work as City Recorder for Zittau and later for the town of Bautzen. Along his journey he changed his name to Latin, Paulus Niavis.

NOTE: Bautzen and Zittau are two of the six towns where the ancient language of Sorbian, an ancient Slavic language still used within the German, Polish and Czech borders. They are the only remaining native minority in the 3-state region. Most had been forced to assimilate into one of the more dominant cultures centuries ago.

Niavis was a great educator and sought to reform Latin so it would become more interesting to more students. Moreover, Niavis hated rote learning and wanted the language of Latin to become more truly universal. His reforms included the writing and publication of a the Iudicium Iovis in 1495, but earlier he had produced the work Dialogus parvulis scholaribus ad latinum idioma perutilissimus which was his first attempt at trying to write a novel in Latin.

The Iudicium Iovis (The Judgement of the God's on the Mines) was the landmark piece for Niavis and environmentalist literature reaching into the modern age, which points to the sagas of exploitation to be described in the centuries to come. It does so by describing life in the world of survival of the fittest in the mining towns of the Erzgebirge, a la befitting of Upton Sinclair and Emile Zola centuries later.

The mining towns of the Erzgebirge, which makes up the borders between the various local peoples and nations of Slavic and German descent (and dialects), include a great deal of upward thrusting mountains. (Not the floating kind seen in the AVATAR, though.) The Erzgebirge is where the first major silver rush in central Europe had occurred in the decades before Schneevogel mastered Latin. Like in any modern day gold rush or discovery of oil or of any other mining resource on the planet, the rush to the Erzgebirge brought different language speakers from all over Europe to fight for the natural resources and to become exploited by those who controlled the most strings or had the most luck in finding the secret deposits of valuable metal.

The locals mostly got run over in the process and gaping wounds soon ravaged the slopes and countryside of the once romantic Erzgebirge region that Niavis had grown up in as a child. Such were the tales of the Iudicium Iovis. It was a story in many ways, which lamented the changes that greed had wrought on the local population and on their landscape during the great silver rush of the 15^th century in the Erzgebirge. It is the same sort of warning that the AVATAR film brings to the fore early on.

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