Friday, August 29, 2008

Playful mating with another woman

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Thanks to Lisa, I've been apprised of a 'lovely tantalizing bit' of woman-on-woman sexuality. It's from the tale of Niall Frossach (a king in the mid-eighth century, High King from 763 CE), from the Book of Leinster, folio 273b-274a, lines 35670-35711 (Vol. 5, p. 1202). Also, apparently, in Liber Flavus Fergusiorum and a late version in Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (c. 15th century):

There was a fine, firm, righteous, generous princely king ruling over Ireland, Níall Frassach, son of Fergal. Ireland was prosperous during his reign. There was fruit and fatness, corn and milk in his time, and he had everyone settled on his own land. He called a great assembly in Tailtiu once, and had the cream of the men of Ireland around him. Great kings and wide-eyed queens and the chiefs and nobles of the territories were ranged on the stately seats of the assembly. There were boys and jesters and the heroes of the Irish in strong eager bands racing their horses in the assembly.
While they were there, a woman came to the king carrying a boy child, and put him into the king’s arms. "For your kingship and your sovereignty," said she, "find out for me through your ruler’s truth who the carnal father of the boy is, for I do not know myself. For I swear by your ruler’s truth, and by the King who governs every created thing, that I have not known guilt with a man for many years now."
The king was silent then. "Have you had playful mating with another woman?" said he, "and do not conceal it if you have." "I will not conceal it," said she, "I have." "It is true," said the king. "That woman had mated with a man just before, and the semen which he left with her, she put it into your womb in the tumbling, so that it was begotten in your womb. That man is the father of your child, and let it be found out who he is."
(translated by David Greene in the Swedish journal "Saga och Sed,"1976)

The implications are intriguing, to say the least. Though it seems the king might reasonably expect a woman to lie about having sex with another woman (and so can assume there was some stigma in such sex), the phrase 'playful mating with another woman' is far from judgemental. In fact, it all sounds very jolly and uncomplicated: just a casual tumble, grins all round.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter? (Does anyone have any further tidbits? I'm learning a lot...)

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

retconning beowulf

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I've been reading Beowulf again, this time Crossley-Holland's translation. I'm struck by its similarity to episodic television drama. (Radio drama too, of course, but apart from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, radio serials were before my time.)

For example, halfway through, around line 1270, we get a recap, a Previously on Beowulf the Grendel Slayer moment:

...one of them, Grendel
that hateful outcast, was surprised in the hall
by a vigilant warrior spoiling for a fight.
Grendel gripped and grabbed him there,
but the Geat remembered his vast strength,
[...] thus he overcame
the envoy of hell...

In daytime soaps characters often announce things the other characters already know. So we'd get some awful piece of dialogue such as, 'Hello Susan, identical twin to my amnesiac foster mother'. In Beowulf, starting around line 1335, we have:

...she has avenged her son
whom you savaged yesterday with vice-like holds
because he had impoverished and killed my people
for many long years...

Why does Beowulf need to be told what he did yesterday? He was there. This is for the audience, because some of them might have missed the earlier installment.

But the biggest swerve of all, for me, was the retconning of Grendel. (Retconning is a fan term, meaning 'retroactive continuity', basically putting a sudden new spin on the information we thought we had about a character, or event, in a long-running series.) Think of all the daytime soaps you've ever watched (or just read about--because none of us have ever stooped to that rubbish, oh no), or that moment in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman's character pauses dramatically and announces 'the hospital administrator you thought was a nice girl actually turns out to be A MAN!' In Beowulf we find that our good old-fashioned monster turns out to be THE OFFSPRING OF CAIN!

I'm not a scholar. I haven't studied Beowulf at any level. Perhaps this is all old hat to the literary historians out there. But it's new to me, and extremely interesting. I've been under the impression that Beowulf was meant to be an epic, one-night performance, like an uncut Shakespearean play, but clearly it's an episodic drama. Why else would the scop put in reminders, rewinds and retcons? (Yes, I know the Anglo-Saxons drank a lot--but so much they couldn't follow one poem over the course of an evening?) It's pretty clear to me that this piece was designed to be performed over several nights; Yule, perhaps, or during the multi-day visit of the king or ealdorman.

Thoughts?

Monday, August 25, 2008

wonderful research resource

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I've just found this (thanks to Lisa Gold, researcher extraordinaire):

http://www.intute.ac.uk/ Intute is an annotated collection of web resources for education and research, created by a network of UK universities. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites and write detailed descriptions. This site contains over 120,000 resources in the arts and humanities, health and life sciences, social sciences, and science, engineering, and technology.

Typing in 'anglo-saxon' led to an overwhelming list of links. I could spend a month here...

Sunday, August 24, 2008

anglo-saxon in the round

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Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum is holding an exhibition, "Anglo-Saxon Art in the Round." For all of us who can't actually get there, here's an audiovisual introduction to the show.




I think it would be marvellous to hold something like this in one's hand.

One of my most treasured possessions is a string of 73 Roman carnelians (first century AD). I wear them all the time, wrapped around my wrist. Most people don't notice them, but I smile to myself because I know I'm wearing jewellery two thousand years old. I positively lust for something gold from times past. A gold thrymsa would delight me beyond measure. Actually, a little sceatta would thrill me, just something the people I'm writing about might have touched.

Coins are on my mind because I've been thinking about money, and trade. Here are my current assumptions: that the economy of north of England, specifically Northumbria, would be still based largely on barter, or payment in kind, with hack silver being a rough and ready exchange where necessary. Coins were much more common in the south, particularly in Kent, with its Frankish trade, and East Anglia, with its brand new king's wic at Gipswic. So I've imagined Hild let loose at Gipswic with two small chest of hack silver, and then tried to work out what she could buy. And how.

First of all, she'd change some of her hacksilver for coin: gold and silver, which for convenience I'm calling shillings and pennies. I'm imagining the gold shilling is a biggish coin weighing about 4 grams and the silver penny is tiny and about 1g. I'm imagining gold was around eight times more valuable than silver, so one shilling = 32 pennies. I imagine you can buy a prime male slave (young, healthy, strong, well-mannered, and skilled) for two shillings, and for a penny a suckling pig or two dozen big loaves of bread. (A lot of work, too tedious to go into here, has gone into those assumptions so if anyone has better figures please--please!--share. I don't want to look like an idiot when this book is published.)

Then I had a lot of fun imagining the goods at Gipswic: the slaves, the imported glass goblets, the honey cakes, the Rhenish wine, the tiny perfume bottles, wheel-thrown pottery, cunning knives, ivory combs, gilt-bronze buckles... Then I had to figure out what it would all be wrapped in, and who would carry it, and how. And of course only a paragraph or two will actually make it into the book, but I feel hugely satisfied.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Hadrian: his show, his wall, his boyfriend

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I just got the latest edition of British Archaeology, which is stuffed with wonderful articles on Hadrian, Hadrian's Wall, and the Antonine Wall. I was also thrilled to find a free DVD in the magazine, short films of Roman frontiers from all around the world--then crushed when I found it wouldn't play in my whatever-this-region-is DVD player. Pah. So now I'm going to fork out $70 for something I should have bought a long, long time ago: a region-free DVD player.

Mike Pitts, the editor of the magazine, writes a wonderful article on the British Museum's new Hadrian exhibition, Hadrian: Empire & Conflict, which, he believes, sets a new standard for public archaeology. There are many misconceptions about Hadrian's Wall--it's the border between England and Scotland, it was built to keep the Picts and Scots out of civilised, Romanised Britain, it's as far as Roman influence stretched in the early second century AD--which this exhibition (and the BA article) should quash. The most interesting notions, though, are one, the parallels the show's curator, Thorsten Opper, draws between Hadrian's times and today's world politics and, two, the role his wall may have played, geopolitically, and the role other more modern barriers play.

For example, he points out that one of Hadrian's first acts on accession as Emperor was to withdraw from Iraq (Mesopotamia). He ponders the Israeli West Bank barrier, how, although it was described by its creators as a defence against Palestinian terrorists, its actual effect is to break up communities: to destroy land, property, access to history and culture, and more. Hadrian's wall probably did the same nearly nineteen hundred years ago: its influence would have been huge north of the so-called frontier.

The show also isn't shy about proclaiming clearly, "Hadrian was gay." The exhibition features the Warren Cup:


and beautiful representations of Antinous--Hadrian's boyfriend --as Osiris and Dionysus. (I'm dying to know who will play Antinous opposite Daniel Craig's Hadrian in Boorman's adaptation of Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.) BA's cover image shows the "Mondragone head."

So why is all this relevant to Hild? Because if Opper is correct in his supposition that the wall functioned culturally very like the West Bank barrier, the impact on northern British society would have been huge, rippling even into Anglo-Saxon times. I'll have to give some thought to this. Hopefully the DVD, once I can watch it (grrr) will help.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Beautiful Sin

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Hild is still prepubescent, but I'm already turning my research attention to sexuality. (In writing terms, I need to have facts about four years ahead of character and plot development so my unconscious brain can be knitting things together without having to worry about taking things to places my conscious brain later finds impossible.) So a couple of weeks ago I started asking around regarding academic opinions of how people in early 7th C. Northumbria might have regarded women and their sexuality.

A friend of mine, who used to be a medievalist before turning her attention to queer theory and film and literature, contacted an expert in the subject. We'd all read the usual suspects (both medieval and queer studies texts*) but, really, there wasn't anything specific about the people and times I'm interested in. As with a lot of my work, I have to just take a lot of guesses and then make shit up. At least I'm not contravening what is known to be known.

Anyway, between the three of us we decided that the most likely scenario was that all women (that is, royal women before the founding of nunneries) got married, and that if they then wanted to have sex with other women no one would much care as long as they were discreet. After all, the point of marriage was alliance, household management, and the provision of heirs. Married girls loving other married girls wouldn't have any impact on any of these points.

So Hild will marry, she will have children. But if I want, she can also notice women. What she'll do after she notices them I haven't yet decided.

Anyway, one of the books I read while pondering this subject was the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (Garland, New York and London, 1996). In that book I came across two pieces that I thought readers might enjoy. The first is a poem:

Etienne de Fougeres. Livre des manières


translated by robert L.A. clark


There's nothing surprising about the "beautiful sin"

when nature prompts it,

but whosoever is awakened by the "vile sin"

is striving against nature.


Him [sic] must one pursue with dogs,

throw[ing] stones and sticks;

one should give him blows

and kill him like any cur.


These ladies have made up a game:

With two "trutennes" they make an "eu," **

they bang coffin against coffin,

without a poker to stir up their fire.


They don't play at jousting

but join shield to shield without a lance.

They don't need a pointer in their scales,

nor a handle in their mold.


Out of water they fish for turbot

and they have no need for a rod.

They don't bother with a pestle in their mortar

nor a fulcrum for their see-saw.


They do their jousting act in couples

and go at it at full tilt;

at the game of thigh-fencing

they lewdly share their expenses.


They're not all from the same mold:

one lies still and the other makes busy,

one plays the cock and the other the hen

and each one plays her role.


** The meanings of the words trutennes and eu are unknown and unattested to elsewhere.

The second is an anonymous letter between two twelfth-century nuns:

translated by peter dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the Euro­pean Love-Lyric, II. 479.

To C——, sweeter than honey or honeycomb, B—— sends all the love there is to her love. You who are unique and special, why do you make delay so long, so far away? Why do you want your only one to die, who as you know, Icves you with soul and body, who sighs for you at every hour, at every moment, like a hungry little bird. Since I've had to be without your sweet­est presence, I have not wished to hear or see any other human being, but as the turtle-dove, having lost its mate, perches forever on its little dried up branch, so I lament endlessly till I shall enjoy your trust again. I look about and do not find my lovershe does not comfort me even with a single word. Indeed when I reflect on the loveliness of your most joyful speech and as­pect, I am utterly depressed, for I find nothing now that I could compare with your love, sweet beyond honey and honeycomb, compared with which the brightness of gold and silver is tarnished. What more? In you is all gentle­ness, all perfection, so my spirit languishes perpetually by your absence. You are devoid of the gall of any faithlessness, you are sweeter than milk and honey, you are peerless among thousands, I love you more than any. You alone are my love and longing, you the sweet cooling of my mind, no joy for me anywhere without you. All that was delightful with you is wearisome and heavy without you. So I truly want to tell you, if I could buy your life for the price of mine, [I'd do it] instantly, for you are the only woman I have chosen according to my heart. Therefore I always beseech God that bitter death -may not come to me before I enjoy the dearly desired sight of you again. Farewell. Have of me all the faith and love there is. Accept the writ­ing I send, and with it my constant mind.

I like the second better than the first, perhaps because I've always disliked the nod-nod wink-wink style of poetry, perhaps because the first is all about what's 'missing'--an irritatingly phallocentric view of lesbianism--and perhaps because one is by a woman in love and the other isn't.


* I can't be bothered to list them all. I've read dozens and dozens, and they all have such grindingly long and dull titles. But here's a random sample (the ones that came to hand first when I went to the shelf):

- Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, John Boswell (Vintage, 1995)
- Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H.Smith (CUP, 2004)
- Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King's Wife in the Early Middle Ages, Pauline Stafford (Leicester University Press, 1998)
- Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints' Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (SUNY, 1996)
- Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, Bernadette J. Brooten (University of Chicago, 1996)