A female historian with a deep-blue belt in taekwondo

I woke up with a few lines of verse in my mind:

By study hard, within the churchyard

Is found the philosopher's stone

I recognized this as the ending of an obscure poem (so obscure I can't even find it online) by Manley Hopkins -- not the immortal Gerard, but that poet's father -- which I had come across somewhere and filed away as memorable for its Byronic wit.

The way I had woken up with these lines in my head suggested some connection with the dream from which I had awoken, which I then made an effort to recollect. Unfortunately, I was only able to recover a few fragments, none of which shed much light on the relevance of the Hopkins lines.

In the dream, I was obsessed with studying the life and work of a particular female historian, whose first name I believe was Sandra. I had a backpack full of books by and about her, as well as my notes, and I was carrying it with me everywhere I went, so much so that people commented on it and said I should really take a break.

In one of the books, I read that Sandra had "a deep-blue belt in taekwondo." I found that to be a very unusual biographical detail -- how often is a martial arts enthusiast described as anything other than a black belt? -- and I became particularly interested in researching it. I started asking various martial artists of my acquaintance about the deep-blue belt, but none of them did taekwondo and, since each art has its own belt scheme, no one could shed any light on it.

Somehow this ended with me at a mechanic's shop asking if they could upgrade my motorcycle's drive belt to a deep-blue one. The mechanic said it was possible, but that I would have to upgrade the tires as well, since deep-blue belts worked best with "Minos brand tires." I imagined these being very wide tires, like those on Batman's motorcycle in The Dark Knight, and I wasn't sure I wanted my bike to look like that.

Also, at some point in the dream, someone told me I was smoking too much and should quit. I protested that I didn't smoke at all.

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Upon waking, I did some follow-up research. First, Pegasus does produce an ultra-high-performance tire called the Minos. It's an automobile tire, though, and would certainly be "very wide" compared to a normal motorcycle tire.

I then had the idea of looking up Sandra on Eldamo, but the closest I could find was sanda, with various meanings ranging from "shield" to "firm, true, abiding" to the demonstrative pronoun "that." Nothing very enlightening there, but sanda turned out to be interesting in other ways.

Then I turned to the idea of a "deep-blue" belt in martial arts. Japanese and Korean don't even make a consistent distinction between blue and green, so I couldn't imagine they would have belt ranks named after specific shades of blue. Only the Russians, I thought, would make such a distinction -- a hunch which turned out to be exactly correct. The Russian Wikipedia article on taekwondo has a table showing two different systems of belt ranking -- "European" and "Korean" -- and the former does have distinct light-blue and deep-blue belts. Checking the corresponding French and German pages confirmed what I suspected: that this "European" system is in fact a distinctively Russian one, not used in other European countries. Interestingly, the (deep) blue rank is the only one (besides white for beginners) that is the same in both the Russian and the Korean systems:

Of course, this distinction between light and dark blue -- a distinction one is required to make in the Russian language -- has played an important role in recent butterfly syncs.

This brief exploration of various taekwondo belt ranking systems made me curious about Chinese kung fu, which as far as I know has no corresponding system of formal ranks. I soon discovered that sanda (散打) -- transliterated the same as the Elvish words I had found on Eldamo when I was looking for Sandra -- is a kung fu term. According to Wikipedia, "'Sanda' originally referred to independent and separate training and combat techniques in contrast to 'Taolu' (pre-arranged forms or routines)."

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This afternoon, I finally found a possible link between the Hopkins poem and the dream. Wanting something to listen to while I did some housework, I put on Michelle Stone's polygamy-denier podcast, "132 Problems." It struck me that she is, loosely speaking, a female historian -- a self-taught expert on aspects of Mormon history -- that she has pursued her "study hard, within the churchyard" -- remaining super-duper-Mormon and, as far as I know, never being excommunicated -- and of course that her name is Stone.