| | Greetings, all. I'm a scholar of obscure Randiana and today the "Ergitandal" bug bit again. (This is a word that appears in "The Journals of Ayn Rand" pp 523 & 543, during Rand's final prep for "Atlas," with an editor's note saying the reference was unknown.)
I've come up with an hypothesis. To my knowledge, it's not verifiable at this point, but it may be a beginning.
Due to Rand's capitalization, I take it that the word refers to a person or place. The only Google hits for it as written are Randians wondering about the mystery. So I Google'd various change-permutations to the vowels - no luck. So either it was something too personal/obscure to appear on the Web as of 2010, or the the word itself was too far off in structure from a more recognizable/findable word. So I looked at the word phono-linguistically: Er-gi-tan-dal. The language-family it belonged to appeared Germanic - strong "er" sound at beginning, placement of decisive "g" and "t" and "d" at syllabic beginnings. So: a word of possible German origin.
Her use of the word in the Journals had always suggested something observed from a distance that evoked a feeling of wonder or might, something building and ascending - characteristically Randian motifs! Germanic + mighty + ascending immediately brought to mind Rand's teenaged trip to Switzerland with her family, during which she climbed hills with a Swiss boy. So I wondered if there could be any hill or mountain with a name that sounded like "Ergitandal" in an area in which she might have gone touring with her family.
I looked up a list of Swiss mountains and scanned down for the "dal" suffix, thinking that least likely to have been misheard - and there is a mountain on the Swiss/Italian border that fits the bill.
So my hypothesis is this: "Ergitandal" is her slightly misremembered (after 30+ years) version of her either having seen personally or seen a photo, in her mid-teens, of the minor summit behind the Matterhorn - "Der Pic Tyndall" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pic_Tyndall - perhaps with a German (or German-speaking Swiss) guide. [ http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22der+pic+tyndall%22 has 48 results .]
If correct, these are the shifts that would have occurred in her auditory memory:
er-gi-tan-dal
der pic-tyn-dall
How this could be verified I do not know, but that's the best hypothesis I can offer for now.
Now back to trying to find Gilles Rioux - see "Letters of Ayn Rand," p 496!
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