Sunday, January 20, 2008

dictionaries

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I've found some very useful OE dictionaries online, but I've been less successful with Old Irish and have absolutely come up empty for Cumbric and other Brythonic languages. If anyone can point me to some resources, I'd be most grateful.

Meanwhile, I did find a short but amusing Alternative Breton Dictionary. I can now say in Breton, 'Is that you that farted, you stinky beast?' So refined...

Coincidence

This blog has moved. My blog now lives here: http://gemaecce.com/

Three days ago I wrote a scene where my protagonist, Hild (now aged ten), stands on the Whitby headland for the first time, by the ruins of an old Roman signal tower and a broken down old church complete with a thorn hedge and graveyard. Here she meets a young cowherd who informs her that when they buried the priest, he kept the priest's book. It turns out to be a personal psalter.

So there I was thinking, 'Well, how on earth do I describe a psalter when I've never even seen one, and, anyway, why is Hild discovering this now?' (I've learnt to pay attention when my subconscious throws something at me, even something bizarre) when I read a post on Michelle's Heavenfield blog that was an absolute gift. From there I went to Wikipedia (how did writers manage before Wikipedia?) and read all about Latin Psalters. Then off I went to amazon.com to buy Gerald M. Browne's The Abbreviated Psalter of the Venerable Bede, and then I drank some tea and had a good think. And today my ten year-old native Anglisc speaking Hild is talking to an ancient Irish willowman about gods and demons. It's all very strange...

Friday, January 18, 2008

Why 'Gemæcca'?

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Why 'Gemæcca'?

I subscribe to British Archaeology, a bi-monthly magazine stuffed with dug-up-in-Britain wonders, covering everything from how to excavate an abandoned Ford Transit Van to discovery of tools created half a million years ago. The thrill factor is variable (I often read it in bed and nod out over the articles). But a few months ago I read a review of a scholarly text about textile production in the early middle ages that knocked my socks off: Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, AD 450-700, by Penelope Walton Rogers (CBA, 2007).

I don't normally continue to research once I've begun the the work of actually committing fiction (facts, until they're fully assimilated, tend to sit in great undigested lumps in my imaginative path) but I had to have this book. It took a week or so to arrive and then I promptly devoured it. It not only derailed my imaginative process, it blew the whole thing off its tracks.

The book lays out in detail what Angles and Saxons wore, and how women made it, and how fashions and means of production changed geographically and chronologically. It demonstrates that women must have devoted at least 65% of their time on textile production. Textile production, therefore, more than child care, more than food production, was their major concern. It was a critical task.

We've all read those awful historical novels where the feisty heroine flings her embroidery down and flees the castle to ride her spirited mare through the forest. No. Wouldn't happen. Couldn't happen. Sticking with their weaving and sewing (and sowing, and harvesting and retting and scutching and beating and spinning and dyeing and weaving and...) wasn't just some boring gendered task designed to keep women occupied, it was vital to survival and quality of life. But if a woman is spending two thirds of her waking life working on textile production, how do I make her life exciting and particular? (More on this, oh much more, another time.)

The first thing I've had to do is reimagine--totally reimagine--the social networks of a small holding, a settlement, a royal court. A lot of cloth production involves cooperative behaviour; a lot involves two-person teams. Immediately, it became clear to me that the notion of 'best friend' would be a deeper, more serious, and quite possibly formalised relationship--perhaps even political at the upper end of the food chain. So then I imagined what that relationship might look like, and then I started hunting for an Old English (in my fiction I'm currently using the term 'Anglisc' but this may change) word to describe that relationship. And the only thing I could find was 'gemæcca', which according to Old English Made Easy means 'mate, equal, one of a pair, comrade, companion' and 'husband or wife'. It's proving to be a complicated but interesting concept.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Where It Began

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This is the novel that I've been aiming for my whole life. I didn't really understand that until early last year when I wrote my memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life (a multi-media memoir-in-a-box about my life in the UK before I came to the US when I was 29). Here's an excerpt from that:

Apart from the family I was born into, the most important factor in my early life was where I was born. Yorkshire's history is stamped on its landscape, literally and figuratively; it moulded its language, which I absorbed with my mother's milk (and grandmother's whiskey).

Leeds is a large city in the West Riding of Yorkshire. If you look at a map of the Great Britain, you'll see that Leeds is on all the big north-south roads, on a navigable river, and almost exactly at the centre of the island. Not at the centre of England, though. In English terms, Leeds was the wild and woolly north.

My father, raised in London (he moved to the inimical hinterland as a teenager when his parents fled the civilised capital to escape his father's disgrace), clung to the notion of Britain, of inheriting empire, because in this way he wouldn't feel exiled to the fringe. My mother's primary allegiance, on the other hand, was to Yorkshire (rather like a Texan's to Texas, and only secondarily to the United States; Yorkshire is by far the biggest county in England and has its own identity). In their own way they wanted to feel secure and at the centre of what mattered.

In island terms, Yorkshire has often been the place where the important things happened. A quick survey of Yorkshire place names (from natural features, to street names, to towns, to pubs) is like cutting a language core: in the sturdy bedrock of Anglo-Saxon there is the occasional gleam of Brythonic Celt heaved up from an earlier age, the pale glint of Norse, even strangely evolved fossils of Latin and Norman French.This hybrid and textured language is largely responsible for who I am. To explain, let me give you a few broad strokes of West Yorkshire history.*

In the Iron Age, the place that was to be Leeds was an agriculturally various land enjoyed by the Brigantes, Brythonic Celts. In the first century the Romans arrived, and started building forts which became cities. Then they built nature-defying roads across hill and dale between those cities, followed by armed camps to guard those roads. The Romans left the region after about three hundred years and left the native Britons in charge again. They formed the polity of Elmet, whose people probably called themselves Loides. Around this time, Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples started visiting Britain and staying, forming kingdoms and acquiring territory. One of these kingdoms, Deira, absorbed Elmet. A couple of hundred years later the Norse--Danes, mainly--arrived and the region lived under the Danelaw, with its own language and coinage and culture. Gradually, after battles and negotiations and marriages and so forth, the Danelaw melded with England. And then the Normans came.

By the time I showed up, 894 years after the Battle of Hastings, layer after layer of language was stamped on the place names of Yorkshire. The first street I remember living on was hilly street called Balbec Avenue. Bal is from a celtic word for hill. The city, Leeds, was the market town of the Loides. Our family would drive for day trips to Otley Chevin, a big rocky outcropping overlooking an ancient market town (Otley bears the distinction of having the most pubs per capita in the British Isles). "Chevin," it turns out, descends from a word very similar to the Welsh (also a Brythonic language) cefn which means "hill." On the way to the coast for a holiday, we'd drive through Wetherby, a name that comes from wedrebi, a combination of wether, that is, neutered sheep, and -by, a Norse word for settlement. The hills were called the fells, from fjell, a Norse word for hill. York (oh, I could write two pages of the evolution of that name) was built on the river Ouse, a name that comes from a Celtic root word, -udso, meaning water (water, in Irish--a Goedelic Celtic language--is uisc, which is the root of "whiskey"). The name of the River Esk, which bisects Whitby (a town on the North Yorkshire coast), also comes from that Celtic root word for water. The River Aire, which flows through Leeds, empties into the Ouse at Airmyn, "myn" being an Anglo-Saxon word for rivermouth. Esk, Ouse, Airmyn...I had a childish vision of waves of invaders, marching along with their Roman short swords or Anglo-Saxon leaf-bladed spears or their beautiful long Norse swords, coming to a river and saying arrogantly to a local fishing along the bank, "You there, what do you people call this?" and the local scratching her head and saying, "This, your honour? We call this 'water'."

I imagined the officer nodding self-importantly and reporting to his commander, later, "...and so we forded the river, which locals hereabouts call the River Water..." And, just like that, history to me was no longer what you found in history books, but was thronged with real people. Words assumed hidden power; I began to understand them as keys to the puzzle of the universe.

Words are like icebergs; nine tenths below the waterline. We don't see the entire meaning immediately but it has mass and momentum; it matters. To me there is all the difference in the world between "muscle" and "flesh," or "red" and "scarlet." Rhythm and grammar matter, too. Yorkshire syntax, more than many regions of England, shows its Celtic roots, its periphrastic, roundabout manner of speaking: "Dyuh fancy going down t'pub, then?"

I'm the product of two thousand years of history. So is what I write.

[* I don't pretend this is terribly accurate. I wrote this as story, not scholarship. Still, if I've made any egregious errors, do please let me know.]


I read what I'd written and thought, Oh, of course, it's time. I'm ready.

I've been preparing for this book, researching it physically, since I was a child, when the family would holiday in Filey and Hunmanby and Scarborough. In my teens I'd take day trips to Robin Hood's Bay.


In my early twenties, I was living in Hull, a depressed (and depressing) industrialised city on the river Humber (the southern boundry line of Deira, which became part of Northumbrian). For a holiday, my partner and I went north up the coast, to Whitby.

The first thing I saw at Whitby was the ruined abbey on the north cliff. I didn't wait to unpack. It's difficult to describe how I felt when I first stepped across the threshold of the ruined abbey. It was a though the history of the place punched up through the turf and flooded me. It was like swallowing the world. I knew my life had changed, I just didn't know how.

After that, every year, sometimes twice a year, I visited Whitby. I walked the coastline. I roamed the moors. I spent hours at the abbey. I started picking up brochures and leaflets and imagining how it might have been long, long ago. Even after I moved to the US, I would come back once a year.

The photo on my first novel was taken at Whitby, when I was thirty:


On one visit to England, I picked up a battered Pelican paperback edition (1959) of Trevelyan's A Shortened History of England. I started reading it on the plane on the way back to Atlanta (where I lived until 1995). I read about the Synod of Whitby and, frankly, don't remember the rest of the flight. This, I thought, this Synod, was the pivotal point of English history.

Two or three years later, I stumbled across Frank Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England. And I was off. For the last ten years I've been groping my way through ever more modern scholarship. I've been reading bilingual versions of Old English and Old Welsh poetry, absorbing the latest translations of Isidore's Etymologies, thumbing through translations of Bede, thinking, thinking, thinking. Dreaming in the slow, rich rolling rhythms of another time and place. This is the most exciting project I've ever embarked upon. It's changing my world. I want it to change yours, too.

  • And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, Nicola Griffith (Payseur & Schmidt, 2007)
  • Anglo-Saxon England, Frank Stenton (OUP, 1989)
  • A Shortened History of England, G.M. Trevelyan (Pelican, 1959)
  • The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. Barney, Lewis, Beach & Berghof (CUP, 2006)

Friday, January 4, 2008

Word Choice

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I'm having a little trouble sorting out some word choices. Specifically, I need to decide whether a certain character would be a gesith, a thegn, or something else (ealdorman?). A gesith, as I understand it, is a warrior companion, a member of the warband. It's a term used in very early A-S times, i.e. the fifth and sixth centuries. To me it has hints of a young, wild, warrior culture: boasts and mead and arm rings. Thegn means roughly the same thing, but was used in the eighth and later centuries. To me it connotes a bit more gravitas, in terms of both the man and the culture: older, weightier, with more responsibility and perhaps a household of his own but, still, a member of the warband, still a big fan of armrings (and sword rings) and oaths and boasts and drinking games. So which would one use for a seventh century warband warrior?

Ealdorman is an even later political construct, I believe, more of a local magnate with specific responsibilities to the king, a kind of baron. But where and when do all these roles cross and/or coalesce? Would a warband thegn have a household of his own, a holding to run, with warriors sworn directly to his service? Or was he a young unmarried fighter hoping to get a lifetime gift of land from the king for distinguishing himself in a fight?

The character I want to talk about is an older (i.e. forty) retired warrior living in a hall/settlement near the sea, who exchanged his oath of direct fighting service for one of overseeing some local coastal trade. It's around 623. Edwin is not yet an overking, but definitely has those ambitions. So what do I call this out-to-pasture country lord?

This is driving me crazy, so if anyone has any thoughts, please (please!) share them.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

History Meme Game

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I'm writing a novel about Hild of Whitby, also known as St. Hilda, who lived in seventh century Britain. For about ten years I've been researching, on and off, the basics: language, the politics of conversion, food, arms and armour, textile production, etc. The more I learn the more I realise I don't know. So I started fossicking about online and came across a few early medieval blogs (where I suspect I've made a bit of a nuisance of myself). One of the bloggers, Michelle at Heavenfield, has tagged me for a blog game. One is supposed to

  1. Link to the person who tagged you.
  2. List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
  3. Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
  4. Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

But in order to play, one has to have a blog. So after some thought, I'm building this one. I hope lots of people come and offer friendly advice, ask interesting questions, or just nod and say hello.

So, obviously, the subject of my game will be Hild. Not much is known about this fascinating woman, and all of it from Bede. (From here on, everything in this post in parentheses is speculative, i.e., I made it up.) Hild was born c. 614, after her mother had had a dream about her bringing light to the land (this sounds like a good ploy from a homeless, widowed pregnant woman: don't hurt me, what I carry is important!). Father Hereric, of the royal house of Deira (possibly son of Æthelric, king of Deira 599-604 when Æthelfrith killed him), who was killed at the court of Ceredig, king of Elmet just before Hild's birth. Mother Breguswith, family unknown (but I'm thinking possibly--per a conversation on Heavenfield--she was a sister of Rædwald, king of East Anglia). Older sister, Hereswith, who married Athilric, son of Eni--who was brother of King Rædwald--and brother to King Anna; Athilric was briefly co-king, with Sigiberht, before Anna took the throne. Hild, along with many of Edwin's household, was baptised by Paulinus c. 627 in York. She then disappears from the record until 647, when after a year in East Anglia she's about to take ship for Gaul to join the widowed Hereswith in an abbey (Bede says Chelles--but Chelles wasn't founded until Balthild took the veil, so I think probably Faramoutiers). It's at this point Aidan, bishop of Lindisfarne (essentially the go-to God Guy for Northumbria), invited from Iona at the behest of Oswald, who is currently king, recruits her to his church, and Hild heads back north. There she spends a year on a plot of land on the Wear (I've never been wholly convinced of this location, but I don't have alternative suggestions, where she is essentially being deprogrammed--stripped of worldliness--and retrained as an abbess). Then she is sent to Hartlepool to restore order (Heiu, the previous boss, goes off and founds another house--in/near Tadcaster?). At Hackness Hild does a cracking job and is given a bigger, better abbey, Whitby/Streanæshalch (which she may or may not have founded). Oswald's brother, Oswiu, now king, sends his infant oblate daughter, Æfflæd, to Whitby. After Oswiu's death, his widow Eanflæd (Æfflæd's mother) joins the abbey. At Whitby, Hild trains five bishops, and hosts the Synod where Oswiu rules in favour of Roman practise. She is known as 'mother' and is a consultant to kings and princes. She persuades Cædmon, a cowherd, to write the first vernacular poem. She dies November 17 680, attended by the usual hagiographic visions of her soul ascending to heaven, and is declared a saint almost immediately. (She was probably buried at Whitby, and then had her remains translated to Glastonbury some time later.)

Everybody who has read Bede knows all this. So writing seven weird/interesting/obscure facts seems rather pointless. Instead, I'll write seven things no one knows about Hild (because I made them up--some informed guesses, some wildly speculative, some naked fictionalisation for dramatic purposes).


1) Hild's real name. Hild is half a name. Her full name could have been almost anything, but I think the two most likely are Hildeburh and Hildeswith. They follow the alliterative H (Hereric, Hereswith). The -with suffix is extremely likely, given Breguswith and Hereswith, but for some reason I don't like the notion of Hild being Hildeswith. It just doesn't sound strong enough. So I'm thinking--per Christine Fell--that -burh is better. 'Hild' means battle, and I think she lived up to it.

2) The murderer of Hild's father. I think Edwin did it. He wanted to be king, and was busy forming alliances all over the country (they all went wrong, with a vengeance; clearly, he wasn't a likeable man)--but so was/did Hereric. So Edwin paid Ceredig of Elmet to remove him (or it could have been an early move by Cadwallon in the kill-the-foster-brother game those two played over decades), and then used the murder as an excuse to drive Ceredig from the forest and annexe Elmet.

3) Hild's husband. Much as I'd rather, for dramatic reasons, she didn't marry, Hild would have definitely have done so. Firstly, all women did. Secondly, she was a valuable game piece in the endless politicking and alliance-forming/breaking of the 7th C. Thirdly, Bede never refers to her as 'virgin'. But I can't decide who Edwin--the man ultimately in charge of her life--would have wanted to hook into his web of allegiance/obligation/hegemony. He already had Mercia (via his wife, Cwenburh--though, again, it went disastrously wrong) and East Anglia (Hereswith) so maybe he tried for a British alliance e.g. Alt Clut. The fact that Bede doesn't mention Hild's husband means she married someone beyond the pale--either a pagan, or a British or Irish royal. But who? I'm utterly stumped here. If anyone is willing to speculate, please help.

4) Why Hild preferred the Ionian to the Roman way of doing things. She was baptised by Paulinus (Roman) and recruited by Aidan (Ionian) while waiting, supposedly, to take ship to Faramoutiers (or some other Gaulish abbey) which would have been more Roman than anything. She was hooked into the Gaulish church six ways from Sunday (probably related in some distant way--through her mother, maybe, or at the very least though Hereswith's marriage--to Balthild) so why didn't she go over there and run something Roman? Instead, she ran Hackness and Whitby under the aegis of Lindisfarne. And she hosted the Synod of Whitby where the vote (okay, Oswiu didn't exactly vote, being, y'know, king) went to Rome.

5) What Hild's role in the early church really was. I think she was a facilitator--my guess is that although Bede doesn't say so, it was Hild's influence and presence in the room at Whitby that kept things civilised, that engineered the appointment of an acceptable compromise candidate to Lindisfarne upon Colman's departure.

6) How well she got on with her family. Hereric died (could have been poisoning--deliberate or accidental--could have been appendicitis, no way to tell) and that death left Hild and her mother and her sister at the mercy of the world. I imagine there was a bit of irrational blame there: you bastard, you left us alone! And then the three women would have to have stuck together to face the world. But mothers and daughters don't often get along so well after puberty. And Hereswith got the good marriage (at least insofar as we know). There again, Hild was the one who got the from-mummy prophecy about being a light of the world. Also, for dramatic purposes, I've decided Hild has a half-brother, Cian (son of Hereric by a British woman, Onnen), who is raised with her but unacknowledged.

7) Why she chose Whitby/Steanæshalch. It has a great harbour, yes, and a high cliff--always good for contemplative-while-seeing-trouble-coming purposes--and there were plenty of Roman roads and old tracks leading to and from busy places. But, still. It's a long way from York, and Bebbanburg, and Dùn Èideann etc.

So here are the seven things I'd most like to know about Hild:

1) why did she spend a year in East Anglia? Did she?

2) who did she marry, and why? What killed her children--plague? War? Malaria?

3) why did she choose Whitby/Streanæshalch? Was there already a small church there?

4) what did Whitby look like? Built of wood, yes, but dormitories or huts? How many people lived there? (When will the latest excavation be published?)

5) what was her favourite colour? Yep, sounds trivial, but it's not. I mean, women of those times would spend about 65% of their days on textile production (cf Penelope Walton Rogers), and when you're that intimately involved in your own clothes, colour choice is a big deal. Plus there would have been rules--at least customs--about who was allowed to wear what. So what does the granddaughter of a deposed king get to wear? And what colours were possible? (How deep a blue could you get?)

6) what time of year was she born? I think autumn. Why? Well, Old English poetry reeks of elegy, and the most elegaic season is autumn, so I like the notion of making the end of Sept/beg of Oct her particular time.

7) what made her tick? Bede tells us Hild ran her abbeys in orderly fashion, and that everyone called her mother. It makes sense, then, that this was possible because she was reasonable, calm, competent, flexible, able to adjust to the evidence i.e. she's like a disciplined scientist who sees an odd result and thinks, huh, that's weird, let's find out why... I bet she loved the Easter calculus. I bet she loved the inherent mathematics (though she wouldn't have know that what it was) of the soaring music James the Deacon brough north. I bet she loved Isidore's attempt to explain and codify the known world in his etymologies (though it's pretty unlikely she had access to this book; but it's not impossible, so I think I'll take some licence). I bet she encountered an abacus at Gipswic when she accompanied Edwin to East Anglia to sort out Hereswith's marriage. She was probably an accomplished linguist, speaking British, Anglisc, Irish, and Latin. How else could she be held in such high regard by so many people? She talked to them. She listened. She let them know they had been heard.

  • Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon, Penelope Walton Rogers (CBA, 2007)
  • A History of the English Church and People (don't remember which translation I used or who published it but, y'know, it's Bede--go look it up)
  • Women in Anglo-Saxon England, Christine Fell (Blackwell, 1987)
So here's the tricky question, who do I tag? I don't really know anyone in medieval blog world who hasn't already been tagged/played. And the few historians I know don't have blogs. So I'll have to go for other writers: L. Timmel Duchamp, Colleen Mondor, Mark Tiedemann, Gwenda Bond, Gwyneth Jones and Jenny D.