Oily Dragon
Senior Master
- Joined
- May 2, 2020
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Except I'm looking at the story right now, and Holmes literally says Baritsu is "Japanese wrestling", not "the cool art that Barton-Wright chap made up".That Conan Doyle deliberately dropped the extra 't' from the name. There's little evidence one way or the other to support the thesis. It's just as likely that he made a typo. It is just as likely that Conan Doyle wrote it correctly and that his editor corrected the manuscript and he made the typo instead of Conan Doyle. It's also just as likely that it was neither a typo nor a deliberate alteration. At the time that Conan Doyle was writing the Adventure of the Empty House "bartitsu" was appearing in print a fair amount (including in some publications that he himself wrote for). It is entirely plausible that Conan Doyle just happened across the name while reading and simply mis-remembered the spelling. It should also be noted that a contemporary London newspaper also misspelled the name as "Baritsu" and Conan Doyle may have copied from that. Or it could easily have been deliberate, perhaps to avoid copyright infringement.
The point is, no one knows if Conan Doyle intended to write a fictional martial art named "Baritsu" or if he intended to use "Bartitsu" and some mistake was made by someone, himself or another, dropping a 't'.
What is clear is that, whether the spelling difference was deliberate or not, Conan Doyle was certainly intentionally implying a link to the real life Bartitsu, 't' and all.
To say that "baritsu" is a "fake" is a little akin to saying that Baker Street is fake because there wasn't actually a 221B.
No one knows for sure. Conan Doyle was known to use real life events and places to spice his writings. He was also not above creating completely fictional and impossible references, such as the famous 221B Baker Street address. There is also a historian who makes a competent case that Conan Doyle was actually the creator of the Piltdown Hoax so it's not beyond the realm that Conan Doyle actually did indulge in an actual conspiracy from time to time.
As far as I'm aware, the only arts Doyle trained were boxing, cricket, and soccer. And yes, I'm calling it soccer, hoping to intentionally offend every European here but especially Ms. Tez.
Happy Monday!