Gemæcca

Three maps of early 7th century Britain

2011-11-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

When a literary agent sends a novel manuscript out to acquiring editors at major publishing houses, s/he likes to send it with everything the editor might need to put the work in context. For Hild, my novel about Hild of Whitby (which of course wasn't called Whitby then), set in early seventh century Britain (the narrative spans 617 - 631 CE), this includes a map, a glossary, and a family tree for the main character/s.

I've spent the last two weeks happily constructing this supplemental material. You've already seen Hild's family tree, along with all my questions and caveats. Today it's the turn of the maps.

I've included three: my first draft attempt, the second iteration made with help from a scientist friend who downloaded GIS data, and the final (so far) representation which collates data from several stages and was polished by a friend who has mad Photoshop skills. If you only have time to look at one, look at the last one.

You can see a much bigger version of each map if you click on it.

So. Map Number One:

I think of of this as my sketch map. I made it by brazenly scanning a map from the endpapers of someone else's book (I will certainly buy the author a drink given the opportunity) and then scrubbing out the names and replacing them with my own (by the squint-and-point method--no claim to accuracy at this stage). This is where you see how sadly lacking I am in Photoshop skills. (Though my Anglo-Saxon Twitter icon might have been an early giveaway.) I hadn't the faintest idea how to make something that looked like a wall, so I just drew a thick line, then 'bit' chunks out of it with dabs of the Brush tool. I used the same tool to dab in the dots for vills and other settlements. And to create Puffin Island/Glannauc, just off the eastern tip of Anglesey/Mon.

Glannauc makes an appearance in the book. More on that later.

But this first map was never intended to be anything but an initial sketch map, a for-personal-use-only building block for the real thing.

For the second map, a friend in New York worked her academic institution's servers half to death to bring me a true projection of Great Britain, complete with relief features. I sent her the sketch map, and coordinates of anything that might be misconstrued (for example, Derventio--see below) and the names of the rivers I needed. She sent me this:

You'll see that there are one or two made up names, too, for example Mulstanton, which is a settlement on the River Esk, below the cliffs of the Bay of the Beacon/Streanæshalch/Whitby (the spellings get fixed in the next iteration). As for Derventio, I plumped for a place close to an old Roman villa, at Malton. (Yes, I know there's another Derventio near Derby, but I wasn't interested in that one, story-wise.)

But I found this map difficult to read. And it still needed territories/peoples adding, and walls, and so on. And I needed more room. So I cropped it to the size I needed, and begged for help from a photographer friend.

This is what we came up with:

If you click on the map, and then zoom in, you'll see that there are actually two Glannaucs: the tiny one is the real one. The big one right next to it is purely imaginary. I just needed the reader/editor to be able to see it. That'll get fixed for publication. So will the relative sizes/fonts of the various peoples and their regions. For this iteration my priority is for editors to be able to find a region on a map quickly, so they didn't have to go look things up and get bumped out of the story.

You'll also see that there's a lot left out. I was ruthless: if it wasn't in the story, it's not on the map. As it is, there are some Irish places, and some non-British locations (Hedeby, Frankia, Less Britain) that are mentioned in the story but not included here for the sake of clarity and simplicity.

If you see something you don't agree with, please let me know--either by email or in a comment. I want to get this right.

I'm hoping I can do the final map for the book in colour. I'm hoping I can do an absolutely enormously detailed map for the website I'll build to support the book closer to publication. I'd love to illustrate tiny little scenes from the book on this enormous map, and include tokens/banners/signs of dynasties/peoples on their region (ravens, boars, bulls, eagles).

What else have you often wished authors included on their maps? Tell me what you'd love to see. Please.

Many thanks to Angélique and Jennifer for their labour of love. Good friends, both.

Hild's family tree

2011-10-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

The new title for my novel about Hild is...Hild. It just makes sense :)

My hand-drawn family tree for Hild is now neatly printed and legible. I'm hoping readers of this blog will give me some feedback.

click to enlarge

As you can see, there are several names missing. For example those Æthelfrithings who died before they amounted to much, historically speaking: Osbald, Osric, etc. There are also wholly fictitious characters, and some invented names for people who know must have existed.

For example Osfrith's wife. We know he had a son. I thought a high-status Frank would suit nicely. And what's higher at the time than the Frankish king? Clotrude sounded like a reasonable name for the sister of Clothar II. There's plenty of time to change this before publication, though, so if anyone out there has a better idea, please make a suggestion. Or at least tell me why this won't work. Or, even better, point me to Osfrith's real wife, whose name I somehow missed.

Similarly, if you know--or are willing to make an informed guess--regarding Osric's wife/Oswine's mother--I'd be grateful. (I didn't bother to invent a name because she doesn't appear in the book.)

You'll see, too, that I invented the name of the daughter of Hereswith and Æthelric: Ælfwyn. I hope that sounds acceptable. If it raises red flags, do please let me know. I have lots of leeway at the moment, but as the book gets closer to publication, change will grow more difficult.

I couldn't find a name anywhere for the niece of Beli of Alt Clut, and I didn't feel competent to even guess at something suitable. If anyone has any notions about that, I'm all ears. Ditto the Pictish wife of Eanfrith Æthelfrithing.

You'll see that I chose to make Eanfrith's mother, Æthelfrith's first wife, Bebba (of Bebbanburg fame). Given the Brittonic sound, I rather arbitrarily plumped for Alt Clut antecedents. If any of that in any way clashes with what's known to be known, sing out.

I also posit a fruitful liaison between Hereric and 'Onnen, some leftwise cousin of Ceredig, king of Elmet'. Their son is Cian. He's one of the major characters in the novel, so if, historically speaking, this is ridiculous, please speak now.

My major choice was to make Æthelric, the king of Deira before Æthelfrith swept in from Bernicia, Edwin's much older brother. This means that when the Iffings fled Northumbria and scattered, Hereric, Hild's father, was the heir-in-exile. I expect some disagreement over that one, but at this point I'm reluctant to change it. Though I'll definitely listen to well-reasoned argument.

Hereric's wife is Breguswith. We know as much from Bede. I pondered making her East Anglian, but for reasons I forget, I couldn't quite make that work. Instead, she's now Æthelbert's daughter--Eadbald's half sister.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, on any and all this.

And sometime soon I'll have a spiffy map to discuss...

Light of the World

2011-09-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

Hild is done (for now). She has a working title: Light of the World. (Subtitle, if novels had such things, might be something like The woman at the heart of war, politics, and religion in seventh century Britain.)

The book, volume one of three, is huge: 963 pages, 197,878 words (excluding the title).

I've sent it off to my agent. She'll get back to me with suggestions, in terms of possible cuts. (With something this length, they're always looking for cuts. It wouldn't shock me if they suggested I cut it in two and publish as separate volumes. I just don't know if I'll listen...)

Now I start looking for expert readers. Key word = expert. This is not a finished work. It still needs shaping. The input I need now is from those who know some aspect/s of the period, Britain 617 - 631 CE: politics, monetary systems, trade, health, family relationships, religion, flora and fauna, war gear, liturgy, metallurgy, textiles... Anything and everything, really. [ETA: Also languages, Old Irish, Old English, and Latin in particular.]

For example, there are two lengthy scenes set in Gipswīc. It mentions trade goods, coinage, exchange rates, food, slavery, elite hierarchy, etc. There's a lot of potential, in just those scenes, to get things laughably wrong. And I have no doubt I do. Some of it will be easy to fix. Some of, given the story, might not be fixable.

If you think you can help, if you're willing to read nearly a thousand manuscript pages of rip-roaring fiction (life, death, politics, nature, sex, violence, grief, joy) and not forward the ms. around to all your friends, if you're willing to accept that the needs of fiction sometimes clash with the facts, please email me or drop a comment to that effect. I can send you a raw .doc file. I can promise that I'll do my utmost to take your input and use it (with deference to the exigencies of story) and I'll thank you in the acknowledgements. (Actually, in the interests of full disclosure, if you're an expert, and are reading this, I probably also read you--so it's likely I'll be acknowledging your expertise anyway, ha. So, okay, I'll also think of some other nifty Thank You.)

I can say this without blushing: I'm a good novelist. This book, though, is a stretch. I've never written a coming of age story, never written from the point of view of a child, never written historical fiction. I need all the help I can get.

I've done my best to get things right. I've had to make some dubious choices here and there for the sake of story (I've mentioned already some of the heinousness regarding music and Fursey). What happens isn't impossible, but some of it is rather, ah, unlikely.

What kind of novel is this? It's difficult to describe because I've never seen anything like it. Imagine Kristin Lavransdatter meets Game of Thrones (only without the dragons). It's epic in every way. Except for actually being an epic in the accepted lit-tech sense: it isn't from multiple viewpoints; Hild is in every scene. So it's an "intimate novel of character painted on an epic canvas." With warlords, priests, and kings. And anxious reeves, stressed out seers, and beleaguered queens. Plus some slaves and farmwives and scops. And more trees than you can shake a stick at. And rivers and oceans and rills and burns and becks, and seals and cows and crows and otters and herons, and death and destruction and famine and plague (well, not plague plague--or maybe just a hint of a possibility of it, in Kent, once--just illness and cattle murrain). And song, and heroism, and gold-and-sparkly-jewels, and plotting...

If I were Empress of the Universe, and if this were a graphic novel not, ahem, a literary work of wide popular appeal, I'd call it: Butcher Bird! (Everything you know about the 7th C is Rong!) Because you don't get to be famous by being all sweetness and light.

But, oof, I'm getting punchy. So I'll leave you with this photo of carnelians, to which Hild is passionately attached. In the book, they're a political gift from the infant Rhianmelldt to the child Hild. I don't specify the hows and whys in the text, but I imagine they were acquired by numeri in Greco-Roman Egypt, then brought to Hadrian's Wall on deployment, passed down through generations (or stolen, or retrieved from a hoard or accidentally-unearthed grave goods, or...), ending up with the British elite. I am also passionately attached to these beads; I own them. (Supposedly they're 1st century Greco-Roman grave goods, dug up from an Egyptian oasis.)

Photo: Jennifer Durham

Britain After Rome, Robin Fleming

2011-09-16T10:17:00.000-07:00

(This is a cross-post from my Ask Nicola blog.)

Thanks to a generous reader, I now have a copy of Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070. (I talk about why I wanted it so much here.) Yesterday, after lunch, before I went back to working on Hild, I flipped through it. I was struck by this statement on page 175:

Hartlepool's abbess Hild had learned the religious life from her sister--the mother of the king of the East Angles and a nun--who had trained at a Frankish monastery...

Bearing in mind that Fleming's book is largely based on material culture, I'm sorely puzzled. I don't understand how the above inference can be drawn from archaeology. Especially as it directly contradicts Bede:

When she decided to abandon the secular life and serve God alone, she went to the province of the East Angles, whose king was her kinsman; for having renounced her home and all that she possessed, she wished if possible to travel on from there into Gaul, and to live an exile for our Lord's sake in the monastery of Cale, so that she might the more easily attain her eternal heavenly home. For her sister Hereswith, mother of Aldwulf, King of the East Angles, was already living there as a professional nun and awaiting her eternal crown. Inspired by her example, Hilda remained in the province a full year, intending to join her overseas; but she was recalled by Bishop Aidan and was granted one hide of land on the north bank of the River Wear, where she observed the monastic rule with a handful of companions for another year.1

As I say, I was just flipping through it. It might be that there's some explanation, some interesting archaeological trail I'm unaware of. That would be thrilling. But right now I have a sinking feeling that she's just imagining.

Just imagining is fine. It is, after all, what I do for a living. But I'm a novelist. This book is presented as a narrative history. I have difficulty accepting that Hild learnt from her sister. In their adult lives, the two sisters follow two different religious traditions. Hereswith was either at Faramoutiers, which, though run under the Rule of Columbanus, was founded in a time and place much steeped in Roman culture (material and otherwise), or, possibly (though much later--it wasn't founded until 658), Chelles. Both would have been under the authority of Roman Christian bishops. Hild, on the other hand, led Hartlepool and Whitby, under Bishop Aidan, who was Ionian-trained, as 'Celtic' a Christian as it was possible to be.

As I don't think Hild learnt from her sister, I'm now going to worry that I have to be sceptical about all her statements regarding eras with which I have no real familiarity. (Almost everything. I know the seventh century well enough to play Jeopardy, maybe, that is, until 680, when Hild dies...)

So if anyone out there has read the book, I'd love to be reassured. I've been looking forward to this one!

1 HE iv.23, trans. Leo Sherley-Price

The never-ending mystery of English

2011-08-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

One of the big mysteries to me as a novelist (as opposed to professional historian) is the lack of a convincing explanation for the apparent obliteration of Brythonic (the native Celtic language of Britain before the Romans came and muddled everything up) and substitution of Old English, a Germanic language. (My terminology is imprecise; I'm not an academic.)

Over at Historian on the Edge, Guy Halsall discusses Steve Brohan's theory of Old English as a lingua franca between the "language of lowland Britain...a Romance low Latin" and "a late Brythonic/proto-Welsh" of the highlands in post-imperialist Britain (think roughly 400 - 600 CE):

Pre-Anglo-Saxon British highlanders would know some Latin but not much - enough to be able to make transactions with lowland villa-owners etc, especially to pay taxes and so on. The villa owners, by contrast, would know no British. When an Anglo-Saxon military elite came to power, however, both would need to learn Old English to communicate with these warrior aristocrats, and knowing this language would enable them to communicate with each other in the new set up.

This makes perfect sense to me. Apart from anything else, it's a survival tactic to learn the language of those who carry the weapons. Misunderstandings could be fatal.

What also makes sense to me: the survival of the native syntax. You can hear this in periphrastic phrasing of local dialect. (I grew up in Yorkshire. My mother's family was from Ireland, my father's from London. When either of them got tired, I could hear entirely different syntactical bones shining through their vocabulary skin.)

All making perfect sense. And yet, and yet... Food for thought.

I just wish, growing up, that I'd known there was such a thing as philology. I might have done a better job of my 2004 memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner notes to a writer's early life:

Yorkshire's history is stamped on its landscape, literally and figuratively, and it moulded the language that I absorbed with my mother's milk (and grandmother's whisky). 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 laid nature-defying roads across hill and dale between those cities, followed by armed camps to guard those roads. The Romans abandoned the region after about three hundred years and left the native Britons in charge again. Around this time, Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples started visiting Britain and staying, forming kingdoms and acquiring territory. 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. 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 (I could write two pages on 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 shields or Anglo-Saxon leaf-bladed spears or 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. It shows in my work.

Speaking of which, the second draft of Hild is cruising along. I'm four-fifths of the way through. It is most definitely not a Romance...

First draft of Hild is finished

2011-03-27T14:33:00.001-07:00

I finished the first draft of the first volume of my novel about Hild. It's huge: 976 pages (more than 200,000 words). I'll lose a lot of that in the rewrite, of course, but it will still be long.

Submitted as proof:

Photo taken with crapcam (sorry about that). It turns out that 976 pages is nearly 11cm (4.5 in) high and weighs north of 4 kilos (>9 lbs).

Why all the detail? So I can avoid actually beginning the rewrite...

Two excerpts from Hild-as-child

2011-01-30T17:41:00.000-08:00

Sentences are something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I've always been a fan of clarity and simplicity: poetry masquerading as prose. Rhythm matters. Word choice matters. Metaphor matters. I love to vary the rhythm and shape of sentences in a paragraph--unless I'm going for a particular effect.

But while writing about Hild, all my notions about sentences fall to pieces. I find myself writing these vinous, sinuous things--in a variety of modes, depending on the mood, geography, and languages spoken by the characters.

Here's a paragraph from the first couple of pages when Hild and her family still live in exile, in Elmet, at the court (I use the word loosely) of Ceredig. She's nearly four:

Hild recalled no sights or sounds of the place they'd come from, the standard against which all was compared, the long-left home. She had vague memories of sun-on-grapes, others of a high place of lowing cattle and bitter wind, of ships and wagons and the crook of her father's arm as he rode, but she knew none of them were home, could be home. She recognised people who might be from that long-lost perhaps never-real home when they galloped in on foundering horses, or slipped through the enclosure fence during the dark of the moon. She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British, or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Nor like the cool clicking tiles of bishops' Latin. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though she had only sung snatches of the strange Latin in songs under her breath. And only when her mother wasn't there: Never stoop to wealh speech, never trust wealh, especially those shaved priestly spies.

And here she is, a handful of pages later, her father dead, at the court of her uncle, Edwin, in Northumbria:

In some ways, Hild's new life was not so different. Her days, the court's days, were one of constant movement from royal vill to royal vill: Bebbanburgh at the end of the lean months for the safety of the rock walls and the cold grey sea, and Yeavering at the end of spring, when the cattle ate sweet new grass and the milk flowed rich and fat. Then south to the old emperor's wall, to the small towns built of stone, and a day at Tinamutha and a boat down the coast to that wide river mouth, wide as a sea, and up the river to Barton in early summer and then, sometimes, Sancton, and always to Goodmanham's slow river valley at summer's height--the rolling wolds crimson with flowers, the skeps heavy with honey, and the fields waving with grain. Then the twenty mile journey to York, with its strong walls and snug stonework, its river roads for carrying the last of the sweet apples and the first of the pears, and high towers in case of bitter war, winter war.

War there was, but in summer. Edwin took war on the road with his warband, ten score gesiths and their men, their horses and wagons, a few handsful of shared women. They were always back before autumn, weighed down, depending on the war, with Anglisc arm rings and great gaudy brooches, British daggers with chased silver hilts--though the blades were no match for Anglisc or Frankis work--or strange heavy coin, and they would wind themselves about with boasts and intricate inlaid sword belts. And always by the end of summer there was a double handful more of big-voiced, hard-chested men glittering with gold. Not all were Anglisc, but they drank and shouted and boasted the same way.

These are sweeping let's-move-time-along sentences, quite unlike the kind of thing I'm used to writing in novels. Certainly there wasn't much like this in the novels about Aud. Aud thought in arrow-straight sentences. Hild is much more elliptical and, of course, much younger. One of the surprises for me writing this book has been the number of asides--often in dashes--I feel compelled to include: something I've never done before in fiction.

As the novel progresses, I do a lot more focus-changing: zooming in on a personal moment, widening out a little to follow interactions closely for a scene or two, then pulling right out and up again to 70,000', to describe the ebb and flow of kingdoms and religions. Generally speaking, the older Hild gets, the more the narrative slows down and sticks with her moment to moment. But the constant zoom and pull is a bit dizzying. I don't always get the focus sharp, or hold it for the appropriate time. But, hey, that's what rewrites are for.

Speaking of which, enjoy the above paragraphs. Who know what will actually make it into the finished product.

H. Rider Haggard and the Venerable Bede

2010-09-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

** This is a cross-post from my personal blog, Ask Nicola **

Yesterday I was feeling torpid and decided to actually read some of the free books I downloaded a few weeks ago, last time I was feeling ill.

I read King Solomon's Mines by (Sir) H(enry) Rider Haggard. I'd always assumed I'd read it before. (I read a bunch of his books as a child. My favourite, easily, was She, though I don't remember much--we're talking forty years ago--apart from the power and glory that was Ayesha. Yum. Echoes, for the child me, of Jadis of Charn, aka the White Witch.)

Anyway, I'm reading along, not recognising anything--apart from the tropes. After all, Haggard pretty much invented the Lost World genre. It's all here, the full-bore colonial overkill: adventure, wild riches, characters who are More Than They Seem, manifest destiny, etc. Jolly good fun if you can cope with the wholesale extermination of game, women as chattel, and adult Africans as either cruel or naïve. (It displays the full panoply of -isms, with the exception of homophobia. Haggard seems touchingly innocent regarding the admiration of manly men. Or maybe he was having fun. He was clearly having fun in other ways.) After about fifty pages I adjusted, and settled in for the happy slaughter.

Once I relaxed, I began to recognise chunks of prose. Haggard was obviously delighting in ripping off the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and a whole host of other vaguely recognisable Classics.

One passage that struck me particularly was a scene wherein the intrepid explorers debate whether to undertake a risky journey across the desert to find the fabled diamond mines. One of their number, Umbopa, asks the leader of the expedition, Sir Henry (is the name a coincidence? I think not) Curtis, "What is life? [T]ell me, white men, the secret of our life--whither it goes and whence it comes!" Then he answers his own question:

"You cannot answer me; you know not. Listen, I will answer. Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere."

Now look at this passage from the Venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People--I'm using the Project Gutenberg translation, whose author I don't recall, offhand), in which one of Edwin's thegns is arguing in support of a conversion to Christianity, on the grounds that Christ alone knows what's what, while we, as puny human beings, do not:

"The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad ; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm ; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant."
(HE II.13)

Haggard adds some Africa-specific stuff to Umbopa's speech: "Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset." But it's Bede in essence.

I love the notion that something written in the eighth century (concerning events in the seventh) is here being applied to the nineteenth century and read in the twenty-first. It's yet another indication of the influence of Hild's time (and Bede's work) on the present day.

Speaking of which, Hild is calling. Time to get back to her.

an update

2009-12-23T11:13:00.000-08:00

Perhaps this will surprise no one but I like the novel I'm writing. I've spent a 100,000 words taking Hild through childhood and am now poised to introduce her to young womanhood. Not a moment too soon.

Don't get me wrong. As I've said, I'm enjoying this novel--delighting in it, in fact. But writing that many words about a child has been a challenge. For one thing, there's no sex. I'm not used to parsing a character's world without the electric tightening of sexuality running through it. It's odd. Lots of people around Hild have been having sex--they're human, after all--but she notices this from the perspective of a person who doesn't know, on a visceral level, what that means. And then there's been the difficulty on getting the most basic information: where did they sleep? What did they eat, exactly, and when and with whom? How did they feel about dogs? Naturally, all this complicated by Hild's ever-changing status. She begins as the second child of an Anglisc prince-in-exile in the forest land of the British people of Elmet. Then she's in Deira, at the brand-new court of Edwin, her uncle. Then she's playing rag-tag-and-bobtail with a warband travelling north of Hadrian's Wall. And so on. Every time I work out one set of details, everything changes. I've lost count of the halls, camps, wagons, vills, ruins, settlements, wics (etc.) I've had to invent and then discard after ten pages. Then within each, say, vill, there's the byre, the dairy, the hall, the weaving huts, the smithy, the kitchens, the temple enclosure, the well or spring, the kitchen garden, the new church... And then different people use these places differently: the wealh and the gesith, the women and the men, the nobles and the priests.

However, I've reached the point where Edwin has been king of Northumbria (Deira and Bernicia), and then overking (of the Angles, and possibly some Saxons, and the probably-Jutish Kentishmen--and, y'know, women), for well over a dozen years. Hild is beginning to return to places I've described before, travel in wagons I've already mentioned, take ship in vessels previously encountered. I can sometimes write as many as fifteen pages before I have to go look something up (and then spend an entire evening getting crosser and crosser trying to reconcile radically divergent scholarly opinion or, worse, stare at nothing, just an empty hole where the data should be).

By now I've mostly worked out how to keep one foot in the not-contravene-what-is-know-to-be-known (particularly regarding gender roles) camp and one foot in the I-can-make-exciting-shit-up! camp while finding a good narrative through-line. I'm happy with my solution to the competition between my need to make Hild extraordinary and to give her agency, and for her to be absolutely representative of her time (and a child, and female).

So now, for a while, I get to play. Now I get to take Hild back to Elmet--the area around present-day Leeds. I was born and bred in Leeds. I love it on a DNA level. Now I get to imagine it fourteen hundred years ago, before cars and roads and train tracks, before power lines and grown-for-product forestry monoculture, before the wolves and the bears were all killed and the cloud systems were never formed by contrails. All that and sex too...

I'm deeply excited.

I just got a fabulous grant!

2009-07-24T16:36:00.000-07:00

The Authors' Foundation, administered by the UK's Society of Authors, have just given me a grant. Now I can do my research in England in person.

Can you spell Bedes World?

I'll be in Yorkshire and Northumberland mostly--Bebbanburg, Goodmanham, Sancton, York (again), Whitby (again), hopefully Yeavering... Any other suggestions?

Oh, this is going to be awesome! Just wish I could have got it earlier--I'd have been at Leeds, drinking beer in The Stables, talk talk talking up a storm about Hild. Hey, maybe next year!

2,000 year-old carnelians

2009-01-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

*** This is a cross post from my daily blog because I feel guilty about not posting anything here for weeks. ***

photo by Jennifer Durham

Around my wrist I wear a set of 73 carnelians cut and faceted in Roman workshops in the first century. They were a present from Kelley for our tenth anniversary. I am passionately attached to them.

I use the plural, workshops, because it's obvious that they are from several different times and places--different colour and clarity, different sizes, different wear patterns. Some, I think, might have been worn for a couple of hundred years; some for only a generation. They were dug up from Bahariya Oasis in Egypt, a centre of Greco-Roman winemaking around the third and fourth centuries. In other words (though no one at the gallery would admit this), they are grave goods.

I don't know the provenance, the chain of custody, of my beads. All I can tell you is they came from a respectable gallery in Australia. I prefer to believe that they were properly excavated, recorded in context, and then legally sold. But I honestly don't know. All I know is I won't give them up, and they've sparked much daydreaming.

They are part of the organising matrix of my fiction about Hild. Originally, I thought I'd write one longish novel about this fascinating woman. But then I found that she wore my beads. And then I wanted to write about a woman of the 3rd century CE who also wore the beads, and a woman of the 10th century, ditto. (Rather thrillingly--at least to me--the tenth century woman is Aud the Deepminded, the historical namesake of Aud of The Blue Place and two other novels.) And the Hild novel grew in my mind to two or possibly three novels. So I have a four or five novel sequence laid out in my head: the Carnelian Sequence.

They look particularly beautiful in the sunlight. Over the years I've tried to catch their fire in photographs, and been driven to despair. The picture above, taken by FoAN Jennifer Durham, comes the closest to how they look in real life. (I believe she used tungsten lights to mimic sunlight.)

So my creative dance card is pretty full, just with the Carnelian Sequence. And yet, as always, I have ideas circling, waiting to land, like a skyful of planes running low on fuel: movies, tv series, stories, novels, graphic novels. Some will crash before I can land them safely, but, wow, it feels marvellous to watch them all tonight, twinkling away up there.

pewter Hild

2008-12-12T21:50:00.001-08:00

Medieval stocking stuffers! What a cool idea. (Via Heavenfield.) Pewter whatchamacallits from Aebba Art Gallery. I've always been very fond of pewter--though I hated polishing it when I was a child. It was always my job before Christmas: rub rub, polish polish, tuh. It was the old-fashioned kind of pewter, too, with lead; hand-hammered. Beautiful in candlelight. I hadn't given it much thought, but I wonder if Anglo-Saxons used pewter much. I know there was a lot of tin in Britain. That and a smidge of copper and antimony (and lead) are all you need. I don't know how people got antimony, though I do know its sulphide is kohl. So if the women were into cosmetics, no doubt they had access.

No, I'm not going anywhere in particular with this. Just noodling. These things would make awesome Christmas tree decorations...

most heinous use of a musical instrument--so far

2008-12-04T00:31:00.000-08:00

I know very well (that is, I think I know) that 'harps' in Hild's time were essentially lyres, like this:

reproduction of Sutton Hoo lyre at the British Museum

However, story-wise my notions of 'harp' are so strong that I've taken the liberty of giving Anglo-Saxons gut-strung lyres, like the one above, and the British--especially the Irish--more traditional twelve-string beasties like this one from the Winchcombe Psalter:

11th c winchcombe harp (from The Winchcombe Psalter, c. 1030-1050 AD), photo from Simon's Anglo-Saxon Harp page

In addition, I've strung the British harps with bronze rather than sheep gut. Their singers are better, too. (Some cliches one simply shouldn't mess with: Celtic harps glittering in the firelight; supple, trained voices, etc.)

To make up for their not-great harps:

I've given the Angles pipes and whistles (though I haven't bothered describing them--too many things to fret about: pan pipes? antler? bone? wood? how many holes? how tuned?) and drums. The Britons would have had these, too, of course, but it's just simpler to divide the spoils. I often wonder whether they had some kind of idiophonic, glockenspiel/marimba-type instrument: bells, wooden blocks, chimes. But this isn't a novel about music, as such, so I elected not to chase down those details in my research. (Naturally I'm eager to hear from those who might have the info at their fingertips.)

One thing I would really like to know more about is plainchant. I know James the Deacon accompanied Paulinus to the north and spent the rest of his life there. But I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like for Hild to hear that kind of music for the first time and fall in love with its cool clarity. Right now she thinks, It was the music stars might sing. Were it water, it would turn any bird who drank of it white. But I'm prepared to accept she might just think it sucked.

Then I run into the difficulties of resonance: plainchant only works in stone buildings. So immediately I have to make the basilica at York still standing, and I have to clear it of hangings and furniture and floor rushes. I have to cover the newly dug fire pits with hard board, which makes the place really, really cold... But it's lovely to imagine Hild standing there wreathed in her own breath, lost in the music. Then, of course, I send her back to the firelit halls of Yeavering with much meatier, rowdier music, perhaps something like this:

and, in the end, I know where my heart lies. But the heart in question is Hild's. Lots of decisions ahead...

Update on Hild, plus Where do they sleep?

2008-10-27T03:17:00.000-07:00

illustration of 10th century (I think) sleeping arrangements

I've been working on my Hild novel for a year now. She is twelve. I have 75,000 words. (To put that in context, most novels are around 100,000.) If you believe Bede's suspicious symmetry, she lived to the ripe old age of 66--so this is turning into a huge project, much, much bigger than I'd anticipated. I'm enjoying it enormously.

Right now in the narrative Hild is about to witness the assassination attempt by Cwichelm's man (yes, I know his name, but don't want to give it away to my primary--non-historian--reader, who reads this blog). She's met Paulinus, and heard James the Deacon lead his first group of half-trained choristers in plain chant (the only suitable venue was the ruined basilica at York, stripped of all furnishings to improve the acoustics). Æthelburh is pregnant. I've gone against received wisdom and have already married Hereswith off to Æthelric (also known, it seems, as Egric to his North Folk, where he rules as prince while Eorpwald is king proper of the East Angles).

One thing that I find I'm fudging, though, is the issue of where Hild sleeps. She's with Edwin, so she travels from vill to vill: York, Bebbanburh, Sancton, Goodmanham, Barton perhaps, somewhere near the Derwent perhaps--I'm positing a new vill built upon some Roman remains near Stamford Bridge--and so on. I've done a little reading on the archaeology of as many of these places as I can and, well, it's not helpful.

If Hild were a warrior-type, a gesith, no problem: she'd bed down in the mead hall with all her fellow sword swingers. But where does a royal relative, a 12-year-old girl, sleep? Looking at the Yeavering evidence I'm tempted to say there was a family hall, or women's hall, not far from the main hall, and Hild could sleep there safely. At other places I've imagined a women's quarters screened off from the main hall but in the same building. I've pictured her with a real bed, which comes to pieces, in a pinch, for travel. But I'm aware that I've taken this notion from funerary practice and it may be inaccurate for daily life.

Anyway, I'm punting here. I'd love to hear some educated opinions (or total guesswork; it's all welcome) on the matter. Are there good sources anyone can recommend? (Preferably online, but I'll take print if that's all there is.)

As always, thanks in advance for your help. I know I'm always asking for stuff, so...is there anything I can do for you in return? Anything of my process/progress you're curious about?

dogs in the 7th century

2008-10-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about dogs; my sister had one when I was seven, but I'm a cat person. Nothing against dogs, I've just always lived in cities, which I think is a hostile environment for large dogs (and small dogs, in my experience--small though it is--tend to yap). So, regarding dogs: utterly ignorant. I've been researching the 7th century for a while now (for my Hild novel), but find I still don't know much about it. So, in this regard too: utterly ignorant. Now I'm faced with writing about dogs in the 7th century and my mind has gone terrifyingly blank.

Here's how I imagine the dog situation in the north of England circa 627:

There are herd dogs--large, loyal protectors of flocks (sheep, cows, goats, maybe even geese) that run with the flock to protect it from predators but don't herd the flock under commands from the shepherd/cowherd/goosegirl. These dogs (sometimes just one, occasionally a pair) would spend much more time with the beasts than the humans. They eat, sleep, even play with the cows/sheep. Perhaps they were imprinted as puppies and mostly think they *are* cows/sheep.
There are sight hounds, coursers and so on, like deerhounds--probably largely under royal or at least 'noble' control.
Bulldogs would control large animals going to slaughter.
There are hounds of war: huge things that perhaps wear spiked collars and are trained to do one thing: kill. These would most likely be kept in royal kennels because they might not be safe to allow anywhere else.
Perhaps isolated farmsteads or small settlements would have a couple of dogs-of-all-trades.
Perhaps people would form bonds with some of these dogs. Perhaps that would be discouraged. Perhaps not.

I read about Cuchulain and his hound, and I wonder, Did they care for each other? Or was the dog just a tool--an important and precious tool, like a sword, but not something to devote feeling to? If dogs were, to some degree, pets, how would they be trained? Would women be allowed to keep dogs? Would they want to?

Hild has basically had a puppy forced upon her by the queen, Æthelburh, who wants a dog for herself (I've yet to work out why) and thinks that if at least one other female at the royal vill--even a child, like Hild--has a dog, Æthelburh won't seem like such a foreign weirdo.

So now I'm trying to figure out how it all works: what would the dog (a bitch, I've decided) look like? Would it have a leash? How would it be trained? I'm thinking a cross between a wolfhound and a Molossian-type herd dog--big, but not as heavy as a Molossian or as tall as a wolfhound--that has protective but not herding instincts, with an urge (though not an overwhelming one) to chase prey. It would hit maturity around 18 months.

So my question for both dog-lovers and medievalists is: does any of that make sense? Do you have suggestions?

anachronism!

2008-09-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

I'm wondering how people feel about anachronisms in historical fiction. Last week I came across a startling instance in a new paperback reprint of a well-received historical-type fantasy (perceived level of tech maybe 2nd or 3rd century CE). This is from a very respectable publisher, lots of critical attention, etc. Yet I hurled it across the room after reading for three minutes. Why? Because on page 5 a character feels a "thrill of electricity." Electricity. In the 2nd century. In a fit of pique, I tossed it in the recycling.* And then tonight, rereading one of my all-time favourites, Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, I found a fish "jackknifing." It bothered me. Not enough to throw the book, but enough to pop me out of the story for a moment.

I'm working really hard while writing this novel about Hild to be rigorous with the language, probably to an excessive degree. For example, in one dreamy, other-wordly passage I wanted to talk about aconite, the poisonous purplish blue flower--but that name wasn't around until the Normans. Okay, I thought, I'll call it Monkshood. But, no, that makes no sense in a society with no monks (we're in Northumbria, pre-Paulinus, pre-Aidan; no doubt there were some Brittonic-speaking priests skulking about but I can't quite imagine monks). So, okay, how about Wolf's Bane? Good--except apparently that usage wasn't known until the tenth century. If I've done my research properly (and, as always, I welcome corrections), the Old English term for aconite was probably thung (þung), a generic term for poisonous plants. But, really, thung? Tuh. It's not poetic at all. So I compromised and called it 'the thung that people call Wolf's Bane'--and one minute later deleted it. I can't bear that level of clumsiness in fiction. So, despite all my efforts, the flower is now Wolf's Bane and I just hope all the botanists and medievalists will not fling the book at the wall.

And I haven't even begun to work out how to deal with the place name problem....

So, your thoughts? Will anyone even notice my (attempted) rigour? Am I being too fussy?

* Yes, I know, I should have recycled it via a loving home, or the library, or something, but it was a freebie (publishers send me a lot of stuff), and I suspect they sent out so many, and it's such rubbish, that soon all potential loving homes will be inundated.

scriþan

2008-09-05T00:08:00.000-07:00

I've come across this verb four times in Crossley-Holland's translation of Beowulf. Shrithe (scriþan). I can't quite triangulate on its meaning. I imagine something between slither and slide and slink and slip but it's irritating not being able to pin it down. I know that in most languages there are no exact equivalents of many words but, still, it's beginning to bug me. I'm not sure if it's a word from which I'm supposed to infer magnificence and/or inevitability, awe or disgust. Is it more 'slither' or 'sail majestically' or what? At etymonline.com I found this:

SHRITHE - Bruce Mitchell's "Invitation" gives this account of the word: "The [Beowulf] poet uses the verb scriþan four times -- of hellish monsters, of shadows, of Grendel, who is both a hellish monster and a sceadugenga 'shadow-goer' and of the dragon. The word seems to imply smooth and graceful movement (it is used elsewhere of the sun, clouds, and stars, of a ship skimming over the sea, and of darting salmon in a pool) and an element of mystery (other poets use it of the coming of May, of the beginning and ending of the day, and of the gradual passing of human life). In Beowulf, there is also a suggestion of menace and danger which is echoed in other poems, where the word refers to the spread through the body of a disease which could be cancer and to flames raging unchecked. Had it survived, poets would have used it as a rhyme for 'writhe' and sports writers would have turned it into a cliche applicable to footballers, cricketers and baseballers, tennis-players, and boxers."

If not for the 'darting' salmon, I'd go for something like 'steal' as in 'stealing up to the door'--a sense of stealth, and smoothness, and movement. Any better suggestions?

brave Beocat, brood-kit of Ecgthmeow

2008-09-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

In honour of it being a holiday, I thought I'd post this poem by the Beowulf scop's cat, that is, Henry Beard. Illustration by, well, me. (It's an old pic; if I were doing it now I'd add a little boar, with bristles along its back, on top. Possibly some engraving on the sides.) Anyway, enjoy the poem--I'm particularly fond of "Hrodent slayer."

Grendel's Dog, from Beocat

Brave Beocat, brood-kit of Ecgthmeow,
Hearth-pet of Hrothgar in whose high halls
He mauled without mercy many fat mice,
Night did not find napping nor snack-feasting.
The wary war-cat, whiskered paw-wielder,
Bearer of the burnished neck-belt gold-braided collar band,
Feller of fleas fatal, too to ticks,
The work of wonder-smiths, woven with witches' charms,
Sat upon the throne-seat his ears like sword-points
Upraised, sharp-tipped, listening for peril-sounds,
When he heard from the moor-hill howls of the hell-hound,
Gruesome hunger-grunts of Grendel's Great Dane,
Deadly doom-mutt, dread demon-dog.
Then boasted Beocat, noble battle-kitten,
Bane of barrow-bunnies, bold seeker of nest-booty:
"If hand of man unhasped the heavy hall-door
And freed me to frolic forth to fight the fang-bearing fiend,
I would lay the whelpling low with lethal claw-blows;
Fur would fly and the foe would taste death-food.
But resounding snooze-noise, stern slumber-thunder,
Nose-music of men snoring mead-hammered in the wine-hall,
Fills me with sorrow-feeling for Fate does not see fit
To send some fingered folk to lift the firm-fastened latch
That I might go grapple with the grim ghoul-pooch."
Thus spoke the mouse-shredder, hunter of hall-pests,
Short-haired Hrodent-slayer, greatest of the pussy-Geats.

From Poetry for Cats, by Henry Beard (Villard, 1994)

playful mating with another woman

2008-08-29T00:34:00.000-07:00

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, 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...)

retconning beowulf

2008-08-27T00:25:00.000-07:00

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?

wonderful research resource

2008-08-25T00:24:00.000-07:00

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...

anglo-saxon in the round

2008-08-24T00:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Hadrian: his show, his wall, his boyfriend

2008-08-22T00:18:00.000-07:00

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.

The Beautiful Sin

2008-08-20T02:04:00.000-07:00

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 lover—she 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)

Heroice Age

2008-07-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

A new issue of Heroic Age at last. Yay! Lots of ruminations on Arthur and folklore, leading off with a piece by C. Scott Littleton on parallels between two tales which may or may not have a common origin:

Abstract: In this paper we consider whether the Norse story of the "Sword in the Branstock" and the Arthurian tale of the "Sword in the Stone" may represent two variants of a tale about a celestial event that occurred 2160 B.C.E

Plus there's the usual assortment of reviews, letters, forum articles, etc., and what looks to be a promising new collaborative column from/with the Babel group. Good stuff.

visualising dairy buckets

2008-05-18T01:44:00.000-07:00

Over on my Ask Nicola blog I had another question about writing. I answered it at length, but thought those who have been following my Hild-writing process might enjoy a snippet:

Sometimes I can have a good writing day yet not write much. This is happening more than usual at the moment, and it's related to writing historical fiction. Writing mainstream fiction is easy--everyone knows what a bed is like, what people eat and wear, how things work. For the seventh century--unlike, say, Regency England (the rake, the dandy, the ball, dance cards), or WWII (the Blitz, rationing, grey skies filled with barrage balloons, weak tea)--there are no handy plug-ins. I have to invent everything, every single thing, from scratch. If Hild walks into the dairy, what does it look like? (Would there be a dairy? Cows were most likely milked in the field, sheep in a pen.) How do you make cheese when there is no stainless steel? What do you store the milk in with no glass, no refrigeration? (You don't; you turn it into cheese and butter and whey.) How many women/girls does it take to milk how many cows and sheep? What are the buckets made of? (Sycamore, because it doesn't leave a nasty aftertaste in the milk.) And that's just process and artefacts. Social relationships were different, too. I've never written anything full of slavery before, never dealt with a heroic society without literacy. (That changes later, of course.) So a good writing day can be a good inventing/visualising day but a not-many-words-on-the-page day.

The rest can be found here. And now back to reading JLA.

Journal of Late Antiquity

2008-05-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

I've just opened today's mail, and found volume 1, number 1 of The Journal of Late Antiquity.

"The Journal of Late Antiquity (JLA) is the first international English-language journal dedicated to the study of Late Antiquity writ large. The journal provides a venue for multi-disciplinary coverage of all the methodological, geographical, and chronological facets of Late Antiquity. All of Late Antiquity will be represented--from the late and post-classical world up to the Carolingian period, and including the late Roman, western European, Byzantine, Sassanid, and Islamic worlds, ca. AD 250-800. JLA is essential, not only as a space for scholarship dealing with practical and theoretical issues, but, in particular, to bridge the gap between literary and material culture scholarship. One of the primary goals of the journal is to highlight the status of Late Antiquity as a discrete historical period in its own right."

I note that the second article is by someone I've actually had dinner with, Edward James. (A first for me. Most medievalists--late antiquarians??--are just photons and electrons floating in the ether. Very kind, helpful, knowledgeable photons, it's true, but not entirely real to me.)

The journal looks wonderful. I can't wait to dig in.

charty process porn

2008-04-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

I've been asked twice in the last week (once over at my Ask Nicola blog, once during a discussion with an Oregon book group about my most recent novel, Always) about charts: do I use them? What are they like? Are they on the wall? So I thought I'd talk a little about my process for this novel.

For my (still untitled) Hild novel, I am keeping a close eye on every single one of the sixty-six years Hild lived (614-680, according to Bede). I'm tracking the movements and changing mores of various dynasties (Deiran, Bernician, Kentish, East Anglian, Dalriadan, Pictish, and so on), doing my best to trace shifting alliances and geographies and beliefs--and building techniques and clothes and literacy and language and technology, and so on (and on and on).

I track all this stuff using the web--listservs and online journals and blogs--the library (I don't know how I would have coped without interlibrary loan; I have no academic affiliations whatsoever), bookshops (oh, these books are *expensive*), and occasional personal correspondence. I've been doing this for years, with the most intensive phase being last year.

My notes are extremely disorganised. When I first began, for example, I used yellow legal pads and a fountain pen. I discovered that fountain pen ink will pour right off the page if you knock a cup of tea over everything. I lost a year's worth of careful notes on jewellery and farming technology. I haven't had the heart to redo that work. By the time I came to researching food, I got canny, and used 3x5 index cards that I could, woo hoo, *sort alphabetically*. (Sadly, yes, this really was an exciting discovery for me. I'm a seriously crap researcher, no technique at all: I've never had to learn before this.) So now my food notes are safe: written in ballpoint and in a snap-closing plastic box. Family trees, most of them highly speculative, are all over the place: Wikipedia printouts, photocopies from library books, hasty scribble in the margin of a shopping list, intensively doodles-on curlicued 3x5 cards... I stuff them in folders, then lose the folders, or misfile them, and start another. I have a pile of print-outs on names, including handwritten--again, highly speculative--names of generations on either side of known names

On my wall are two maps: Britain in the Dark Ages, north sheet and south sheet. They're from different editions but I don't mind. It helps me understand the way information would have been gathered piecemeal in the seventh century. The 1964 edition is cleaner and simpler, but the 1934 is prettier, and more effective aid to imagination (though stinky with mildew and someone else's cigarette smoke).

I work from two desks. One in the corner of my office, taken up entirely by electronics--well, there's enough space to balance a notepad, too. (The wall maps are on the right hand corner wall.) The other desk takes the centre of the room. This is where my Big Chart lives. It's divided into 66 boxes, one for each year of Hild's life. This is where What Is Known to Be Known is written: the births, deaths, marriages, accessions, murders, baptisms, wars and so on. As I am about to begin each new section of the book, I study my chart, then write out two or three pages of notes, this time including highly speculative possibilities: after Raedwald's death, Hild travels to Gipswic and encounters her first abacus, or Hild's (fictitious) half-brother gets his first sword (which he will then use in a year or three to defend Edwin during the assassination attempt by Cwichelm's man, Eamer). Then I write the story, trying to pull in environmental detail (when are the lambs sheared? when do the moths fly? where will the moon be? how high the tides?). It's a slow, but joy-filled process.

I want this novel to have a kind of wild magic running through it, the magic of history and nature, of people and their triumphs and failures. I want it to be stately and inevitable. I want it to be exhilarating, heart-pounding, gut-wrenching. No doubt as I proceed I'll to make sacrifices here and there, privileging one state for another, but right now I'm still aiming for the Platonic Ideal of a novel: thrilling, educational, thought-provoking, morally uplifting.

no comparison

2008-04-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

Today I got my copy of British Archaeology (May/June 2008) in the mail. On p.30-37 there was a wonderful, detailed article, "The Lost Royal cult of Street House Yorkshire," on the finds at Street House Farm, near Saltburn, North Yorkshire, the 'possible cult centre' graves with the fabulous jewellery. Everything is now beginning to make sense.

However, reading this article hot on the heels of the one in Discovery News makes me even more disgusted with the 'reporting' in the latter. In British Archaeology, Stephen J. Sherlock and Mark Simmons explain carefully the reasoning behind the possible Christian repurposing of the iron age coin (basically, the coin had a sort of cross-like pattern on the reverse, and the piercing of the coin meant that it would hang with that cross properly oriented). They also make clear the timeline of the inhumation: probably while Hild was founding Whitby.

Given that this site is only about ten miles from Whitby, my connect-the-dots fictional engine has been working overtime. I've decided who the powerful, high-status woman in that grave was and why she was there. I know why her jewellery and that of her cohorts is such a mix of Angle and Merovingian and Iron Age. And I'm having a marvellous time inventing it all. I'll do another, longer post on all that another time (when it's all set and sorted and written). For now I'll stick to the reportage aspect of all this: I only got to this thrilling (to me) new fictional place because the journalism in British Archaeology was honest, it made sense, it didn't contradict what is known to be known. Unlike that piece of rubbish in Discovery News. Tuh.

I am appalled

2008-04-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

A friend just sent me this link to a Discovery News article on the recent excavation of a royal Anglo-Saxon grave. I'd read about it a few months elsewhere (thanks to links provided by a variety of blogs, for example Carla Naylund Historical Fiction ) and this article wouldn't rate a mention but for its truly appalling inaccuracies. It's really, really bad. Either the reporter is misquoting Stephen Sherlock, or Sherlock is ignorant (or letting his publicity-seeking gene warp his judgement), or the editor had a total brain cramp and made stuff up. The article speculates that the 'stridently pagan' grave at the centre of the dig is of a royal woman, probably because of the truly striking jewellery found:

The reporter goes on to say that Sherlock believes the most 'likely suspects' for the identity of this well-provided-for body are 'Ethelburga, the wife of King Edwin,' or 'Eanflaed, the wife of King Oswiu,' or 'Oswiu's daughter, Aelflaed'.

I saw red. For one thing, if Bede is to believed, all three royal women were securely Christian. For another, Æthelburh is assumed to be buried in Kent, and Eanflæd and Ælfflæd at Whitby, where they were co-abbesses. Another leap, involves 'iron age coins':

These are said to be pierced 'to hang as if they were crucifixes' and therefore suggest 'at least one member of the [buried] group was interested in Christianity'. Since when is a piece of coin jewellery anything like a crucifix? This is a very, very sad piece of journalism.

So now I'm wondering, what's the worst bit of medieval sensationalism you have seen?

Most Heinous Use of an Historical Character (So Far...)

2008-04-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

Time to confess: I've been taking unconscionable liberties with a well-known historical character.

I took a very brief and most definitely dubious mention of a possible siege of Bebbanburg by Fiachnae mac Báetáin of the Dál nAraidi, turned it into reality (well, fiction). But that's not the worst of it: then I had one of the hostages captured by Edwin turn out to be Fursey, aka Fursa, an Irish prince-monk who later in life spent time in East Anglia doing his best to bring Christianity to the godless heathens. (In my opinion, he didn't do a spectacular job.) Saint Fursey was known as an ascetic, but in my novel, he's a wine-swilling, foul-mouthed, sinfully proud, louche kind of fellow--but extremely well-educated. He spends a few months as Hild's tutor. He is about to travel with her to East Anglia where he'll see opportunities for the future, and then return to Ireland, go through a character volte-face, and return with his brother.

So if I know Fursey's saintly character is utterly unlike the picture I'm painting in my novel, why am I using his name? I'm not sure. For some reason, I feel compelled to. I think it's my Catholic upbringing; I am very (very) suspicious of 'saints'. I've spent too much time with Religious who use their religion as a political tool. In my opinion, those who end up being beatified have worked entirely too hard at becoming well known. Seriously good people tend not to bring their deeds to the public's attention. But, no, that's not the whole story. There's something about both kicking over stones, and about tying things together with familiar names that appeal to me.

Hild herself in my novel will have no unearthly, god-given powers--unless you count preternatural intelligence and a will of adamant. She has an innate sense of fairness but this will, of course, be tempered by her royal heritage: she's been raised to believe some people are more equal than others. But I'm not actively going against anything known to be known about Hild. I can't honestly say the same for Fursey. (At least I'm doing my best to make him likeable, in a bad-tempered kind of way.)

Anyway, I just thought it was time to admit my trespasses.

General Update

2008-04-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

I now have 37,000 words. Hild is ten. She has just deliberately assumed the uncomfortable mantle of lightbringer, per her mother's prophetic dream. She knows she has no otherwordly gifts, but she knows this is the only way to persuade the king to do certain things she--being a very bright and observant child--believes to be necessary. She is very, very lonely.

Naturally, all is about to change: Roman Christianity is about to come to Northumbria, in the persons of Æthelburg, a princess of Kent, and Paulinus, a bishop. Hild, still very much alone, will find herself between a rock and a hard place. But she'll also be exposed for the first time to patristic learning. It should be interesting...

Edwin's banner, Edwin's family name

2008-03-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

According to Bede, Edwin was preceded by a standard bearer, carrying a 'tufa'. My assumption has always been that this was a Roman-style standard, or perhaps a staff. At some point I'll need to work out what that looked like. But another assumption I'm making is that he didn't assume such pretensions until the late 620s, after he'd remarried and brought Paulinus's Roman Christianity to Northumbria. What did he use before then? A banner with a typical Anglo-Saxon animal totem, such as a wolf, eagle, raven, horse, or boar? I don't recall any mention of such a thing.

Does anyone have any references they can point me to? Failing that, any guesses?

Also, while the family names of several A-S dynasties are known, for example the Wuffingas, did Edwin's Deiran royalty have a dynastic name? Again, I've never noticed in my reading, but I often don't notice things until I need to notice them. So I'd appreciate any help, including educated guesses. Wild, blue-sky guesses would also work :)

Arbeia/Tinamutha (?)

2008-03-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

I've got myself into a bit of a muddle, a plot hole involving time and geography: I need to get a warband from Galloway to Bebbanburg lickety-split. If they were only a few people, I'd put them on a boat to Solway Firth, then send them galloping along the Roman road to Arbeia-that-was, then taking ship up the coast to Bebbanburg. It looks good on paper, but I simply don't know enough about wind and tide and current, etc., to know if it makes sense. (Or how long it would take.) Also, for plot reasons, I need a small group to get diverted south, down the east coast, and end up in Streanæshealh.

Let me add that this is around 623, and it's Edwin's band, out on its usual summer ramble: looking threatening, picking up the usual tribute. (I imagine a big, very well-equipped band which prefers to offer overwhelming superiority in order to get the booty without fighting. But they're perfectly happy to fight if necessary. It's just that few groups at this time would be willing or able to even think of matching them, so they'd smile in public, chew their mustaches in private, and dig up the hoard.)

But then Edwin finds out something scary and has to hot-foot to Bebbanburg to protect it. (I'm on very thin ground here, historically. I read once, somewhere, that one of the Irish annals mentions Bebbanburg being beseiged by Fiachnae mac Baetain as a result of his on-going dispute with Edwin over Vannin/Mann -- but I haven't been able to remember where I read that, or which annals. All I've found is a very vague reference in Wikipedia.)

And then when I started thinking of Arbeia/Tinamutha, I remembered Osric. Given that Oswine was supposedly born there, it might be reasonable to suppose that Osric was living there at this time. But what would his relationship with Edwin have been? Would he be living quietly under the radar? Would he be part of Edwin's warband? Would he be a kind of coastal Ealdorman?

I'm feeling muddled. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Seeking OE reader recommendations

2008-02-21T17:57:00.001-08:00

I've finally become wholly exasperated by the blank verse translations of my elderly edition of OE poetry. Can anyone recommend a really good collection? Bilingual would be best. I need all the usual suspects--Widsith, The Ruins, Wanderer, Fight at Finnsburgh etc., plus a few riddles--and the more I come to understand of OE, the more I realise what I have really won't do. In fact, I think it deserves a place in the dustbin...

place names/etymology

2008-02-18T16:14:00.000-08:00

I need to decide what to call a fortified camp south of Carlisle, that is, what the people of Rheged in the early 7th C might have called it. It's known these days as Brougham; the Romans called it Brocavum (it was the base of Danubian numerii) but now we're a few centuries on. I know nothing of Brittonic etymology. However (because, y'know, I'm always willing to take a guess), going by the change of Eboracum to Ebrauc, perhaps Brauc or Broauc might not be too far off the mark. Thoughts?

Imagery

2008-02-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

I spent a while yesterday morning sitting on a bench overlooking Puget Sound and was struck by how, although the water looked the same as it must have looked for thousands of years, the sky was very different. It was full of contrails--not just the sword-like slash of a just-cut trail, but also the gauzy cloud that such trails turn into. How long is it since I saw a trailless sky? Probably six or seven years (Sept 12th, 2001). It would be easy to fall into the unconscious trap of describing sky in terms of the twenty-first century.

But I'm writing about the seventh century. Skies were different, then. The smell of the air was different: no deodorant, no plumbing, no clean gas heat; no petroleum-based combustion engines, no Indian or Thai spices (not in the time and place I'm thinking of). No aniline dyes. No plastics. Lots of dung and disease. Lots of wet wool. Lots of delicately-scented weld, and the aromas of malting and oasting barley. Peat smoke. Baking bread. Bad teeth. Freshly tanned leather. Dogs. Horses. Unwashed hair.

And then there's the imagery. People can't pop up from behind a wall like balloons. They would have to pop up like, hmmn, like laundry with the air trapped in it pops from the water, like a piece of wood from a ship breaking up on the bottom of the sea. A horrible sound couldn't be like fingernails on a blackboard, it would be, well, uh, ask me later.

I love this part of the writing discovery process. It's not just about politics, or gender roles, or character or story, it's about building a world. I'm living in another time and country, and I don't need to pack.

Slavery, language, cultural annihilation

2008-02-08T22:22:00.000-08:00

After a careful reading of Richard Coates' Invisible Britons (thanks, Marisa) I was pondering upon slavery, language, and cultural annihilation and, frankly, getting nowhere at the speed of light. And then in the Economist this week, I encountered an article about the evolution of language that ended (in typical Economist style): "As Noah Webster, the compiler of the first American dictionary, put it: “as an independent nation, our honor [sic] requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” In other words, if you don't speak proper, you ain't one of us." It was my way in.

Britons, I've decided, disappeared because their culture disappeared. Their culture disappeared because their language disappeared. Their language disappeared because they were slaves. Speaking Brittonic was forbidden or at least frowned upon by those with the power over life and death and to grant favour. If you wanted to belong/get fed/escape punishment/better yourself, you learnt Anglisc and used it. As those in power did not use a written language, no records were kept of interesting snippets of legends or songs. Brittonic was obliterated, just as in the twentieth century, with the advent of radio and television, many UK dialects and accents began to wither away. In the twentieth centure, if you didn't speak with something approaching the BBC accent (received pronunciation), you weren't quite the thing. You didn't belong.

I grew up in the north of England, surrounded by sturdy Yorkshire accents. My father, though, was from London, so at home I grew up using a long 'a', saying 'baath' and 'fahst' and 'grahs'. When I got to school, those around me assumed I was stuck up and trying to act better than they were because they used a short 'a'. 'Oooh,' they said, 'Miss hoity-toity.' They didn't like my being better than them--which is what they believed, simply because of the accent--but looking back it's clear I was treated differently because of it. (Sometimes this was an advantage, sometimes it really, really wasn't.) But my accent marked me. It's powerful stuff.

Coates' thesis makes complete sense to me. Brittonic died because it was not only dangerous to speak it but also painfully uncool. I'm going to have to go back to beginning of my draft and reimagine a lot. But now at least I have a way to approach the slavery issue. All very exciting.

Tribal Hidage

2008-02-06T15:10:00.001-08:00

Today I started flipping through Barbara Yorke's Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England and I came across her discussion of the Tribal Hidage which, she asserts, was most likely put together for use by Mercia as a guide to expected tribute payments. The thing is, this doesn't make sense to me. Why would a king of Mercia want to list his own territory in terms of tribute? The way I see it, tributary payments of subject peoples would have been the responsibility of their king. So a king would only list the kingdoms, or peoples, of kings who 'owed' him. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick altogether? This is not making sense to me...

So if this wasn't drawn up by and for Mercians, was it a Northumbrian document? (And are some of the hidage amounts, e.g. only 600 for Elmet, indicative more of the friendliness of the overlord towards those territories than of the size/ability to pay of same? If so, why such a whopping amount for Kent?)

And if Barbara Yorke is wrong about this (and of course I'm quite prepared to be corrected in this regard), what else in her fab book (and, apart from the hidage thing, it is seriously fabulous--I wish I'd found it sooner) should I be wary about?

dictionaries

2008-01-20T17:45:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-20T17:25:00.000-08:00

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...

Why 'Gemæcca'?

2008-01-18T17:17:00.001-08:00

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.

Where It Began

2008-01-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

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)

Word Choice

2008-01-04T14:38:00.001-08:00

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.

History Meme Game

2008-01-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

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

Link to the person who tagged you.
List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
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.